The power outages and gas shortages in Texas provided Jones and his company an opportunity to profit. And he took it.
Jerry Jones is doing what he has always done: trying to cash in. He is damn good at it. He is a billionaire for a lot of reasons: business acumen, luck, fearlessness and the willingness to do things like jack up the price of natural gas at a time when the people of Texas need it the most.
As Texans continue to go days without power or heat, shale-driller Comstock Resources Inc., a publicly traded company of which Jones is the majority stockholder, has, according to NPR, been selling gas at “super-premium prices.” It has been “like hitting the jackpot," Roland Burns, Comstock’s president and CFO, said on a Wednesday earnings call.
This is business to Jones, as defensible to him as—I’m being hypothetical here, of course—another billionaire claiming that not paying taxes “makes me smart.” Jones does not need the money, but need has nothing to do with this. Making more money for himself is one way he keeps score. (Winning Super Bowls is the other, though he hasn’t done that in almost three decades.)
O.K. then. Let’s keep score.
The citizens of Arlington contributed $325 million to fund Jones’s playhouse, AT&T Stadium. Jones pays the city a paltry $2.5 million per year to operate the stadium. This deal is supposed to be an economic generator for Arlington, and maybe it has been. But an implicit reason for agreements like these is that a team does not just belong to the franchise owner. A team belongs to the citizenry that cheers it on. Right.
Now you see how Jones is treating Texans in their time of need. We can call this a betrayal, but it’s really just an extension of the relationship between Jones and Texans. It is impossible to arrange a fair transaction when one party is in it for love and the other is in it for money. Years ago, when Jones wanted a stadium deal, he enlisted Roger Staubach in the public effort, a clever way to make the vote seem like an act of fan loyalty without explicitly calling it that.
Jones knew what he was doing then, and he surely knows what he is doing now. If all the clothing suddenly disappeared from the state, Jones would start selling Cowboys sweatshirts for $1,000 each.
Remember this story the next time your favorite team asks for a new stadium or your favorite player is accused of being greedy because he wants to test free agency, or even the next time you shell out cash for merchandise.
The Dallas Cowboys are America’s Team in NFL Films’ telling, and Jones has cannily managed to monetize that image without using the actual moniker. He bought the Cowboys not just because he wanted an NFL team, but because he wanted this NFL team, the one with arguably the biggest fan base in American sports. He knew the Cowboys meant something to people. He loves that. He is a master at making money off it.
Jones won three Super Bowls early in his Cowboys tenure and has desperately tried to win a fourth ever since. In that way, his desires seem aligned with those of his fan base, but still: He is doing this for him, not them. He did foot most of the expense of the stadium, but that was not because he wanted to boost the Arlington economy. He wanted the world’s fanciest stadium. In the 11 years since it opened, the Cowboys’ franchise value has gone from $1.6 billion to $5.7 billion, according to Forbes.
That would be enough for most of us. Yet Comstock Resources is selling gas at prices ranging from $15 per thousand cubic feet to $179 per thousand cubic feet, a markup of between 600% and 7500% over pre-crisis levels. The idea that people might desperately need the gas and can’t afford this has probably not even occurred to him. The church of market worship has a narrow definition of sin.
Jones should be embarrassed, but billionaires don’t get embarrassed by what they see as good business deals. They get embarrassed when many people call them out, or when the public shame is so great that the good business deal morphs into a lousy one. Cowboys fans can show Jones how angry they are by cutting down on their financial support of the team. Logic says they should. History says they will not. Jones is betting that he can make money by price-gouging the very people he purports to represent. In that sense, he is a fitting owner of America’s Team.