Dallas Cowboys Owner Slammed Over 'Hitting The Jackpot' With Gas Prices As Texans Suffer
Critics are scorching the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys for “hitting the jackpot” with his natural gas prices amid a record-breaking winter storm that left Texans shivering — and dying — without heat and electricity.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is the majority shareholder of the publicly traded Comstock Resources Inc., a shale driller operating in Texas and Louisiana. Investors whooped it up in a conference call over the rocketing fuel prices spurred by soaring demand in the frigid South.
“This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices,” Comstock President and Chief Financial Officer Roland Burns said on the call Wednesday, Bloomberg reported. “Frankly, we were able to sell at super-premium prices for a material amount of production.”
Such reveling struck many as, at the least, insensitive.
Jones is “doing what he’s always done: trying to cash in,” grumbled Sports Illustrated writer Michael Rosenberg.
Jones was happy to enjoy a $325 million taxpayer subsidy for the AT&T Stadium that hosts his team, noted Rosenberg. “Now you see how Jones is treating Texans in their time of need. We can call this a betrayal.”
“It is impossible to arrange a fair transaction when one party is in it for love and the other is in it for money,” Rosenberg added. “If all 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 labor secretary, noted that “billionaires profiting off of human suffering is a feature, not a bug, of our rigged system.”
As his fellow Texans suffered and even died due to the state's power outages, Jerry Jones' natural gas company was gloating about "hitting the jackpot" thanks to skyrocketing gas prices.
Billionaires profiting off of human suffering is a feature, not a bug, of our rigged system.— Robert Reich (@RBReich) February 20, 2021
Comstock had already ramped up production in anticipation of natural gas prices climbing. It’s now grabbing “super-premium prices” as high as $179 per thousand cubic feet. The same natural gas last quarter was selling for an average of $2.40 per thousand cubic feet, reported National Public Radio.
So the companies that failed to invest in winterizing their equipment benefit from a spike in prices resulting from their own negligence. Meanwhile, the people they serve freeze to death in their homes and burn furniture to boil water to drink. pic.twitter.com/Nek4bWnAhA
— Father of Wagons #BillsMafia (@FatherOfWagons) February 19, 2021
A woman and her child died in a car trying to keep warm.
Jerry Jones and Texas Republicans definitely made a killing— TrumpNeck (@Francis_3) February 19, 2021
They can't do a damn thing about it. This is exactly what our Texas politicians wanted: a grid free of federal regulation, so that they could profit.
Nevermind Texans are suffering while these asshats stuff their pockets. 🙄— Fancy Boots (@TexasFancyBoots) February 19, 2021
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.