[Beetle01]

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.

Thats just a flat out lie, they have even stated they have over 200BIllion in liquid cash just sitting around. They make almost 100million dollars profit a day. Thats 7 months of profits. No matter what the number is, they should pay for their mistake. Thats the business, its risky, they know that, we should not bail them out. Part of the risk of drilling for oil is the environmental disaster that can occur if a spill happens. SO basically BP could still operate at 100%, pay all their bills and employees, and pay for this cleanup in 7 months and be done with it, and move on. But they wont they know our weak govt officials will give them whatever they want, especially Republicans.

Also those figures you show do not include the money BP profits but then reinvests, it is not counted on the profit line.