Apple may have challenged ExxonMobil as the biggest American company, but the business that deals with fuel for the energy that powers the world's economy is not much older. Now it's come to be state within a state — with its own foreign policy — and not one that necessarily conforms to the foreign policy of its home country. ExxonMobil is not "a US company," says its former president, Lee Raymond. "I don't make decisions based on what's good for the US." That's a quote from Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power by Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Coll, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and president of the New America Foundation in Washington.
