Wikipedia tells me the company is valued somewhere between 1 and 7 trillion but has $30+ trillion is assets. I'm not a business person, shouldn't it be valued at more simply by the fact that is has a huge amount of assets?

I'm not an oil or gas expert, but the low valuation vs assets might be because many of those assets are underground in hard to reach places. Reserves may be proven but not economically viable to access at the current price of oil, for example.

A company's valuation is roughly the estimated sum of all its future profits until it shutters or goes bankrupt.

Most of those 30 trillion assets are deep into the ground, and cannot be turned into profits for free. If you need to spend (say) 2 dollars for every 3 dollars of worth of oil you extract, then the value of the company is already <$10T. The operating expenses can be pretty high. There's also taxes and interest.

Also, we don't know what the price of oil will be in 5 or 10 years, so we have to price in that uncertainty too.

Seems about right... Exxon has about 1/12th the proven reserves and (taking the 7t est for aramco) 1/20th the market cap (380b)

http://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxon-mobil-corpora...