But look: it's not my claim that Exxon is a good investment. In fact: Exxon's stock seems to have tracked the prevailing grim sentiment about the oil business. Rather, what I'm pointing out is that it doesn't seem reasonable to suggest that Exxon is "functionally dead", a "phony-baloney" company propped up by paymasters in the rigged financial services industry. Exxon is, as a company... kind of important? Like, it does a bunch of stuff?
Another example: Boeing. We're all aware of a big reason for Boeing's predicament. But Boeing didn't get there by being a "zombie" that wasn't doing real business; in fact, we can probably ruefully say Boeing did too much business on the 737 Max product. So there's another reason you can be on the "zombie" list: your company made a huge mistake that will take years to climb out from.
Moderna was also on the list Taibbi linked to. Because it was an R&D company that wasn't meaningfully shipping product. I don't know that we even need to talk about Moderna's financial prospects (I genuinely have no idea what they are) to dispose of the idea that it's a "functionally dead" "phony-baloney" company; it's a key, effective component of a strategy to rescue the world from a global pandemic. So there's yet another way to get bucketed as a zombie: you can be a startup.
My point --- I was too lazy to type it last night and am too lazy to come up with a way to say it succinctly now, sorry --- is that Taibbi is either taken in by or preying on a layman's understanding of the word "zombie" to drive a column about how 1/3rd of the market is kayfabe. There is probably a way to make that point, maybe without even having to argue that Ford Motors is a fake company. But Taibbi tried to make it by linking to an article that calls out Tesla and Moderna as examples of the "zombie" phenomenon; he either hasn't read his link, which basically refutes his argument, or he's assuming you won't. Because after he writes that link, he goes on to imply that "zombie" means here what a normal person thinks it means. And it does not.
The estimate from https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/XOM--Probability-Of-B.... is that it has a 36% probability of bankruptcy in the next 2 years.
In a longer time horizon, Exxon's finances are strongly dependent on petroleum revenue, but petroleum demand could easily fall.
The petroleum industry is projecting that when COVID ends, demand will come back. And they are projecting that as far out as 2050, gas will remain the dominant source of energy for transportation.
However neither seems likely to me. I believe that we will see a permanent shift towards more remote work. That cuts out both a lot of commuting. It also cuts out a lot of motivation for business travel. (Bill Gates estimates a 50% drop in business travel.) Both suggest a permanent drop in demand in the short-term. And in the long-term, the transition to electric vehicles seems likely to go much faster than the gas industry wants to believe. We are already seeing places like Washington State pass laws that all new cars must be electric by 2030. This suggests that the transition to electric will be eating into gas revenues fairly quickly. This is not a small issue - use of oil for personal transportation is somewhere near half of all oil usage in the world.
So you say that "nobody thinks that Exxon is about to go under". But I'm looking at it and I think that they are a company that structurally has financial trouble, in an industry that has market trends against it. No matter how big a household name they are, I would be very happy to take a bet that they go bankrupt in my lifetime.