Rex Tillerson

Rex Tillerson is an American energy executive who served as the 69th United States secretary of state from 2017 to 2018 in the first administration of Donald Trump. From 2006 to 2016, he was chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of ExxonMobil.

Tillerson began his career as a civil engineer with Exxon in 1975 after graduating with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. By 1989 he had become general manager of the Exxon USA central production division. In 1995 he became president of Exxon Yemen Inc. and Esso Exploration and Production Khorat Inc. In 2006 Tillerson was elected chair and chief executive of ExxonMobil, the world's sixth-largest company by revenue. Tillerson retired from ExxonMobil effective January 1, 2017.

Tillerson is a longtime volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. From 2010 to 2012, he was the national president of the Boy Scouts, its highest non-executive position. He is a longtime contributor to Republican campaigns, but did not donate to Donald Trump's presidential campaign. In 2014, Tillerson, who had made business deals on behalf of ExxonMobil with Russia, opposed the sanctions against Russia. He has previously been the director of the joint United States-Russia oil company Exxon Neftegas.

Tillerson became secretary of state on February 1, 2017. An unconventional choice for the role, Tillerson's tenure was characterized by a lack of visibility in comparison to his predecessors in the traditionally high-profile position of secretary of state. During Tillerson's tenure, new applications to work for the Foreign Service fell by 50 percent, and four of the six career ambassadors as well as 14 of the 33 career ministers, equivalent to military four- and three-star generals, departed. After their relationship deteriorated, Trump dismissed Tillerson in March 2018, and replaced him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

Early life

Tillerson is the son of Patty Sue (née Patton) and Bobby Joe Tillerson, and named after Rex Allen and John Wayne, two Hollywood actors famous for playing cowboys. He was raised in Vernon, Texas; Stillwater, Oklahoma; and Huntsville, Texas. He has two sisters, Rae Ann Hamilton, a physician who resides in Abilene, Texas, and Jo Lynn Peters, a high school educator. Tillerson's father was an executive of the Boy Scouts of America organization, and this led to his family's move to Huntsville. Tillerson himself has been active in the Boy Scouts for most of his life, and in his youth he earned the rank of Eagle Scout.

At age 14, while living in Stillwater, Oklahoma, he became a busser in the student union building at Oklahoma State University and began picking cotton for work on weekends. In 1968, two years afterward, he became a janitor of one of the university's engineering buildings.

Tillerson graduated from Huntsville High School in 1970. He was leader for the percussion section of his high school band, in which he played the kettle drums and snare drum, and he earned spots in the all-district and all-region bands during his senior year. Tillerson received a college scholarship from the University of Texas Longhorn Band. He received a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. During his time at UT Austin, he was involved with the Tejas Club (an all-male secret society) and the marching band.

Business career

Exxon

Tillerson joined Exxon Company USA in 1975 as a production engineer. In 1989, Tillerson became general manager of the central production division of Exxon USA. In 1995, he became president of Exxon Yemen Inc. and Esso Exploration and Production Khorat Inc.

In 1998, he became a vice president of Exxon Ventures (CIS) and president of Exxon Neftegas Limited with responsibility for Exxon's holdings in Russia and the Caspian Sea. He then entered Exxon into the Sakhalin-I consortium with Rosneft.

In 1999, with the merger of Exxon and Mobil, he was named executive vice president of ExxonMobil Development Company. In 2004, he became president and director of ExxonMobil. Upon this appointment Tillerson's replacement of Lee Raymond as CEO of Exxon Mobil was implied. His major competitor was Ed Galante, another Exxon executive. On January 1, 2006, Tillerson was elected chairman and CEO, following the retirement of Lee Raymond. At the time, ExxonMobil had 80,000 employees, did business in nearly 200 countries, and had an annual revenue of nearly $400billion.

Under Tillerson's leadership, ExxonMobil cooperated closely with Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter and a longtime U.S. ally, as well as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. From 2003 to 2005, a European subsidiary of ExxonMobil, Infineum, operated in the Middle East providing sales to Iran, Sudan and Syria. ExxonMobil leaders said they followed all legal frameworks, and that such sales were minuscule compared to their annual revenue of $371billion at the time. In 2009, ExxonMobil acquired XTO Energy, a major natural gas producer, for $31billion in stock. Michael Corkery of ''The Wall Street Journal'' wrote that "Tillerson's legacy rides on the XTO deal." Tillerson approved Exxon negotiating a multibillion-dollar deal with the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, despite opposition from President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, both of whom argued it would increase regional instability.

Tillerson lobbied against Rule 1504 of the Dodd–Frank reform and protections, which would have required Exxon to disclose payments to foreign governments. In 2017, Congress voted to overturn Rule 1504 one hour before Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state.

On January 4, 2017, ''The Financial Times'' reported that Tillerson would cut his ExxonMobil ties if he became secretary of state. Walter Shaub, the director of the United States Office of Government Ethics, said he was proud of the ethics agreement developed for Tillerson, who was now "free of financial conflicts of interest. His ethics agreement serves as a sterling model for what we'd like to see with other nominees."

In September 2023, ''The Wall Street Journal'' reviewed previously unreported internal ExxonMobil documents that showed that after the company issued its first press statement acknowledging that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, Tillerson and other company executives sought to diminish public concern about climate change by casting doubt on the severity of climate change impacts.

Ties with Russia

As the CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson has ties with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. They have been associates since Tillerson represented Exxon's interests in Russia, the world's largest producer of crude oil, during Russian president Boris Yeltsin's tenure. Tillerson was responsible for the development of a partnership between Exxon and state-owned oil company Rosneft and the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to acquire a stake in Yukos, owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, before the firm was nationalized after Khodorkovsky's arrest. John Hamre, the president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, of which Tillerson is a board member, says Tillerson "has had more interactive time with Vladimir Putin than probably any other American, with the exception of Henry Kissinger".

Tillerson was a friend of Igor Sechin, the executive chairman of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, and leader of the Kremlin's ''Siloviki'' (security/military) faction, who has been described as "Russia's second-most powerful person" after Putin. Exxon owns a dacha next door to Sechin's, and Tillerson would often visit there. Tillerson led Sechin on a tour of New York City, dining on caviar with him and Putin at ''Per Se'' restaurant. In 2006, Exxon avoided making any government concessions in its Sakhalin-I oil field after Royal Dutch Shell was forced to sell half of its ownership in Sakhalin-II by the Russian government.

In August 2011, Putin attended a ceremony in Sochi where Tillerson and Sechin signed an agreement between ExxonMobil and Rosneft to drill the East-Prinovozemelsky field in the Arctic Ocean valued at up to $300billion. The Rosneft deal also gave the state-owned oil company a 30% stake in Exxon owned assets in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, Canada, and West Texas. The company began drilling in the Kara Sea in the summer of 2014, and a round of sanctions against Russia introduced in September that year due to the Russo-Ukrainian War was to have brought the project to a halt in mid-September. Nevertheless, the company was granted a reprieve that stretched the window to work until October 10, which enabled it to discover a major field with about 750 million barrels of new oil for Russia. In July 2017, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control fined ExxonMobil $2million for violating sanctions in its dealings with Sechin, leading the company to sue the government.

In 2013, Tillerson was awarded the Order of Friendship by Putin for his contribution to developing cooperation in the energy sector.

In June 2017, Tillerson said Trump had asked him to "stabilize the relationship (with Russia) and build trust".

Compensation

In 2012, Tillerson's compensation package was $40.5million. It was $28.1million in 2013, $33.1million in 2014, and $27.2million in 2015. In late 2016, Tillerson held $54million of Exxon stock, and had a right to deferred stock worth approximately $180million over the next ten years. Tillerson is estimated to be worth at least $300million. When he left Exxon, Tillerson was four months away from retirement, at which time he would have been entitled to a $180million retirement package. He owns two ranches in Texas, where his wife, Renda, raises cutting horses.

On January 3, 2017, ExxonMobil announced they had reached an agreement with Tillerson "to sever all ties with the company to comply with conflict-of-interest requirements associated with his nomination as secretary of state".

Wayne Tracker alias

While CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson used an alias email address "Wayne Tracker" for eight years and sent thousands of messages. In response to a subpoena issued from the New York State Attorney General's office (part of a state investigation into whether Exxon had misled investors and the public about climate change), Exxon produced about 60 emails associated with the "Wayne Tracker" account, but did not inform investigators that they were Tillerson's.Rex Tillerson 'used email alias' at Exxon to talk climate change
, BBC News (March 15, 2017). ExxonMobil said the account was "used for everyday business" needs such as "secure and expedited communications" between Tillerson and top company executives.

Tillerson's use of the alias became publicly known in March 2017, after New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wrote in a letter to a judge that Tillerson had used the "Wayne Tracker" email for at least seven years. Later that month, Exxon revealed that emails from the alias account from September 2014 to September 2015 were missing; a further search recovered some emails, but none between September 5, 2014, and November 28, 2014. An attorney for Exxon said a "unique issue" limited to that account led to emails being automatically deleted.

Other affiliations

Tillerson is a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the American Petroleum Institute. He is also a member of the Business Roundtable. In 2013, he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was a member of the executive committee of The Business Council

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