(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk restarted production at Tesla Inc.’s only U.S. car plant, flouting county officials who ordered the company to stay closed and openly acknowledging he was risking arrest for himself and his employees.“I will be on the line with everyone else,” the chief executive officer said in a tweet Monday. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”After fending off a potentially costly defamation lawsuit and emerging with mild consequences from a court battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission last year, Musk, 48, seems emboldened to again try his luck with the law. The lead lawyer on Tesla’s lawsuit Saturday against California’s Alameda County over its reopening restrictions helped Musk beat the case brought by a cave diver he called a pedophile in 2018.This time around, Musk is doing battle over measures to contain a virus that he downplayed starting in January. After claiming Covid-19...
(Bloomberg) -- Hemmed in by weak demand and scarce storage, the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas may soon face a stark choice: curb output or ignite a battle for market share that has the potential -- just as in the oil market -- to turn gas prices negative.Qatar began in February redirecting LNG cargoes away from Asia, where the coronavirus was hobbling sales, and sending them instead to northwestern Europe. That quick fix didn’t last, as the pandemic soon engulfed Europe’s biggest economies and left Qatar struggling for places to park unsold cargoes.The Persian Gulf state led by Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has a key decision to make with far-reaching consequences. Cutting production of its main export would squeeze government revenue at a time when crude’s collapse is adding to pressure on LNG prices, some of which are linked to oil. An output cut might also...
(Bloomberg) -- Some drillers in the biggest North American oil field are reopening wells shut in response to the pandemic-driven price collapse, according to pipeline giant Energy Transfer LP.In the Permian Basin’s Midland region, about 8% of oil volumes that feed Energy Transfer’s pipe network had been shut at the start of the month, Mackie McCrea, the company’s chief commercial officer, said during a conference call on Monday.“As of today, we’ve seen about 25% of that turned back on,” McCrea said.The reopening of wells shut for as little as a few weeks may undermine U.S. President Donald Trump’s pledge to assist a coalition of OPEC and allied oil producers like Russia in taming a global gut. Trump, for his part, indicated U.S. output could be trimmed by 2 million barrels a day, albeit by market attrition rather than government-imposed quotas.McCrea didn’t say how many barrels of Permian production has been restored....
