Critics are scorching the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys for “taking the jackpot” with his natural gas prices amid a record-breaking winter storm that shuddered – and died – the Texans without heat and electricity.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is the majority shareholder of publicly traded Comstock Resources Inc., a shale drilling machine operating in Texas and Louisiana. Investors hit it off in a conference call about skyrocketing fuel prices spurred by rising demand in the icy south.
“This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prizes,” Comstock President and Chief Financial Officer Roland Burns said on Wednesday during the call, Bloomberg reported. “In all fairness, we were able to sell at super premium prices for a significant amount of production.”
Such pleasure struck many as at least insensitive.
Jones “is doing what he’s always done: trying to make money,” grumbled Sports Illustrated author Michael Rosenberg.
Jones was happy to enjoy a $ 325 million taxpayer subsidy for the AT&T stadium where his team is located, Rosenberg noted. Now you see how Jones treats Texans in their time of need. We can call this betrayal. “
“It’s impossible to get a fair deal if one party is in it for love and the other is in it for money,” added Rosenberg. “If all of the clothing suddenly disappeared from the state, Jones would start selling Cowboys sweatshirts for $ 1,000 each.”
Robert Reich, who was President Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, noted that “billionaires benefiting from human suffering is a feature, not a bug, of our fake system.”
Comstock had already ramped up production in anticipation of the rise in natural gas prices. It is now grabbing “super-premium prices” as high as $ 179 per thousand cubic feet. The same natural gas sold for one last quarter average $ 2.40 per thousand cubic feet, National Public Radio reported.
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