41 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel MaddowBlowout
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Stolen Goods”
Here Maddow recounts the rise and fall of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a now exiled Russian businessman, and his oil company Yukos. Khodorkovsky’s story, set against the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies, describes a Russian entrepreneur whose fortunes reversed with the rise of Vladimir Putin. After successfully founding a bank and investing in multiple ventures, Khodorkovsky focused on what would turn out to be his most valuable venture of all: Yukos, an oil company that by 2002 “accounted for nearly 20 percent of the crude oil produced in Russia” (28). Khodorkovsky grew Yukos into a giant by using unconventional methods, such as bringing in an Oklahoma oilman, Joe Mach, to oversee Yukos operations in Siberia. With American-style drilling methods, Mach helped boost Yukos’s production by more than 10% in his first year on the job. Yet, just as Khodorkovsky’s success with Yukos was skyrocketing, his good standing with the Kremlin was fading, a sign of things to come.
Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president after the fall of the Soviet Union, was forced to resign after falling into corruption and “amassing a tidy private fortune for himself, his wife, his daughters, and select friends” (33). Yeltsin’s presidency imploded, just as Russia nosedived into an economic slowdown more severe than the Great Depression. As Yeltsin stepped down, his successor was already poised to take over. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative, was set to become the next president of Russia, after blackmailing Yeltsin’s primary accuser, Russia’s prosecutor general, with a fake sex tape. Putin was determined to “reestablish Russia’s sense of honor, to […] restore the idea of Russia as a Great Power and a state worthy of and demanding respect in international affairs” (34).
Putin and his minions, the siloviki, used any means necessary to ensure their interests were kept intact. With all of his wealth and independence, Khodorkovsky no longer fit into these interests, especially with his new plans for Yukos. Khodorkovsky was negotiating a deal with ExxonMobil that would give the American oil giant a 30% stake in Yukos and front-row access to Russian oil. Khodorkovsky was arrested and jailed in October 2003, and in a swift series of maneuvers, Yukos was torn apart and remade into a stronger version of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company that had floundered for years. As Putin rose to the highest ranks of Russian politics, Khodorkovsky watched his greatest business accomplishments crumble. Rosneft, meanwhile, attracted foreign investors like Morgan Stanley. Khodorkovsky serves as a cautionary tale for anyone who opposes Putin’s vision for Russia.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Charlie Hustle”
Another central figure emerges: Aubrey McClendon, the charismatic co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, a publicly traded company from Oklahoma City. The chapter title alludes to Chesapeake Energy’s place in the natural gas world, acting as its proverbial Charlie Hustle, “drilling anywhere and everywhere: under a suburban country club’s manicured lawns, a university’s parking lot, an airport’s runways and terminals, and right next to schools and day-care centers” (51). Aubrey McClendon’s personal wealth is also detailed throughout the chapter, as McClendon used the company’s success to justify the life of luxury and extravagance he flaunted around his hometown. Both greedy and generous, McClendon accumulated money and stuff in the heyday of Chesapeake Energy, such as a “multimillion-dollar, 100,000 bottle wine collection—not because he was a great connoisseur, but because he fancied himself a great investor” (53). Chesapeake Energy’s exorbitant success, and the rise of regional competitors like Devon Energy, fueled the local economy, boosting it to unprecedented heights and making Oklahoma City the “most recession-proof city in America” (55).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Thunder Up!”
The story of Oklahoma City’s meteoric rise continues in this chapter, as Maddow chronicles the city’s ambitions of becoming one of America’s great cities. The city had been weighed down by its reputation as a “black-and-white world of want and woe, of underfed domestic refugees fleeing a dusty hellscape” (56), and by the 1995 bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. It’s eventual emergence as a major American city would not have been possible without the boom of the oil and gas industry. In 2008, at the onset of national economic recession, its two biggest energy companies, Chesapeake and Devon, brought in $25 billion of gross revenue. Cementing its status as a newcomer on the list of great American cities was the brand-new NBA team, the Oklahoma City Thunder. The team’s partial owner was Aubrey McClendon, who ambitiously bought the franchise with a few other partners and transplanted the team from Seattle (formerly the Supersonics) to his native city.
Oklahoma City was not, however, immune to the recession that plagued the nation in 2008. Before the Thunder ever played a single minute on the court, Chesapeake’s stock fell alongside that of countless other companies. Titans of the US economy fell like dominoes after the Lehman Brothers collapse. For Aubrey McClendon, the consequences were dire, as he “lost two-thirds of his wealth in a matter of weeks, and that stark fact was reported in business sections of newspapers across the country” (66). Chesapeake Energy would keep fighting, however.
Chapters 3-5 Analysis
In these three chapters Maddow compares two central figures: Khodorkovsky and McClendon. Both are entrepreneurs, both are bold and ambitious, and both are successful oil men. Yet Khodorkovsky’s downfall comes with Putin’s meteoric rise to the Russian presidency, his eventual imprisonment a concoction motivated by political rivalry and potentially even envy. Meanwhile, McClendon’s rise through the ranks of American capitalism is a fairy-tale endorsement of the American dream, particularly for the people of his native Oklahoma. Yet in many ways McClendon was more charm than truth; Maddow asserts that what “he lacked in strict truthfulness, he made up for in boyish and enthusiastic sincerity” (45). By the end of the Chapter 5, Maddow has established the world of this book, the world of Big Oil and Gas, using both Khodorkovsky and McClendon as central characters to shape her sprawling narrative.
Related Titles
By Rachel Maddow
