Warren Buffett's OXY Stock Play: The Latest Drama, Buffett's Angle, and Why You Shouldn't Believe the Hype

So let's get this straight. Occidental Petroleum's stock is in the toilet, shedding over 5% on a Thursday to close at a miserable $45.08. Volume is down. The Wall Street geniuses, all seventeen of them in their identical suits, are slapping a "Hold" rating on it, which is finance-bro code for "don't touch this with a ten-foot pole but we don't want to piss anyone off by saying so."

The company's quarterly revenue is down over 6% year-over-year. Everything's pointing south.

And then, the Bat-Signal goes up. A rumor, a whisper in the after-hours dark. The name "Buffett" gets mentioned. Suddenly, the same stock that everyone was running from becomes the hottest ticket in town. The sentiment on Stocktwits, that digital hive of hope and delusion, flips to "extremely bullish."

Give me a break.

It's like watching a flock of pigeons fight over a stale piece of bread just because a hawk flew by. The market's reaction to anything involving Berkshire Hathaway is so predictable it's painful. And offcourse, the rumor turned out to be true. Warren Buffett's empire is buying OxyChem, Occidental's chemical division, for a cool $9.7 billion. The stock pops a measly 1% in pre-market. The pigeons got their crumb.

It's Not a "Strategic Move," It's a Fire Sale

Translating the Corporate Gibberish

You have to read the press releases. It’s a special kind of masochism. They’re masterpieces of saying nothing while using the maximum number of syllables.

Occidental's CEO, Vicki Hollub, says this deal "strengthens our financial position and catalyzes a significant resource opportunity."

Let me translate that from PR-speak into English for you. It means: "We are absolutely drowning in the debt we took on to buy Anadarko back in 2019—a deal, by the way, that Warren Buffett himself financed—and we're selling the family silver to make our next interest payment."

This isn't a bold strategic move. This is a garage sale. They're using $6.5 billion of the proceeds just to get their principal debt down below $15 billion. This is a bad situation. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of a balance sheet, and Buffett just showed up with a firehose full of cash and a contract.

Then you get Greg Abel, Buffett's successor-in-waiting, commending Occidental for their commitment to "long-term financial stability." That's rich. It’s like a lion commending a gazelle on its cardio right before the kill. Berkshire isn't doing this out of the goodness of its heart. It's carving off OxyChem, a reliable, revenue-generating machine that pulls in $5 billion a year making stuff people actually need, like chemicals for clean water and recycling batteries. It's the stable, boring part of the business.

Berkshire gets the predictable cash cow. Occidental gets to keep the volatile, unpredictable, debt-laden oil and gas exploration business. What a deal.

html The Rigged Game Starts Before You Even See the Page

You Can't Even Read the Bad News Anymore

You know what really gets me? I was trying to pull up some of the source data on this, and half the damn sites hit me with a "Please enable Javascript and cookies" or "Disable your ad-blocker to proceed." I'm trying to figure out the specifics of a multi-billion dollar corporate maneuver that affects pensions and 401ks, and I'm getting locked out like I'm trying to pirate a movie.

It's all part of the same infuriating system. Obfuscate, distract, and make it just annoying enough to get the real information that most people give up. It ain't a coincidence. They want you trading on headlines and "extremely bullish" sentiment, not on the grim reality buried in a 10-K filing that you can't even access without letting them track your every click. It's a rigged game from top to bottom.

"Restructuring" or Just Picking the Carcass Clean?

The Oracle Plays Chess While Everyone Else Plays Checkers

Let's not forget the history here. This whole mess started in 2019. Occidental got into a bidding war for Anadarko Petroleum and was desperate. So they went to Omaha, hat in hand, and Buffett gave them $10 billion. In exchange, he got preferred stock that pays Berkshire an 8% dividend. Forever. Or until Occidental can scrape together enough cash to buy it back, which Hollub is now hopefully saying might happen in... 2029.

So, for years, Buffett has been collecting a massive, guaranteed dividend. He also loaded up on common stock, becoming their largest shareholder with nearly 27% of the company. He's had his hooks in them the entire time.

Now, with the company under pressure from weak oil prices and that mountain of debt, he makes his move. He's not buying the whole struggling company. Why would he? He's just taking their most resilient asset. He’s paying with cash, and Occidental immediately uses that cash to pay down the debt from the last deal he helped them make.

It's a beautiful, brutal, circular masterpiece of financial engineering. He profits on the way in, he profits while he waits, and he profits on the way out by picking the company apart for its best pieces. They're telling us this move helps them focus on their core oil and gas business, but when you're selling your most stable source of revenue to service your debt...

Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe this is some 4D chess move to unlock shareholder value. But from where I'm sitting, it looks like a pawn being sacrificed to save a king that's already in checkmate.

The House Always Wins

Look, let's be real. This isn't a story about Occidental's brilliant restructuring. It's a story about Warren Buffett doing what he does best: waiting for a good company to make a bad decision, then patiently bleeding it for years before taking its best assets for his own collection. Occidental got a cash infusion to put out a fire, but they sold their fire insurance to do it. The retail traders on Stocktwits got a one-day sugar rush. And Warren Buffett gets a new, boring, money-printing machine to add to his fortress of cash. Same as it ever was.

Reference article source：

• Occidental plunges as OxyChem sale draws analyst criticism over timing, price (OXY:NYSE)
• Occidental Petroleum (NYSE:OXY) Shares Down 5.5% - Time to Sell?
• OXY Stock Rises As Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Reaches Deal To Acquire OxyChem For $9.7 Billion