[Hoot Gibson]

I got this from USA Today idk how accurate it is I would have to say forbes is more but...for the sake of showing it...

" we see the company generated a strong average annual compound rate of return of 17.9%" full article

There are lots of financial measures used to evaluate businesses but net profits after taxes is the most common one quoted. The mainstream media tends to focus on dollars of profits as opposed to percentage when their goal is to make the companies sound greedy.

The sheer size of a company's profit, in terms of dollars, is one of the least meaningful measures but that is the one most often quoted in articles about coal, oil, or gas companies. Newspapers rarely compare the net profit margins of energy companies to those of other industries because it makes the reported profits of those companies sound much more reasonable.

American taxpayers should be glad that BP has been a profitable large company or else we would be footing the clean-up bill for their spill. $20 billion (or more) will wipe out a lot of BP's past profits.