The account as dictated, preserved verbatim. Everything elsewhere on this site that derives from it is a distillation — and where the two differ, this governs.
Dictated by Jonathan Paul Hare in working sessions with Claude (Anthropic) and transcribed in-session. Lightly cleaned for typographic errors and false starts; wording, sequence and emphasis preserved. Not an audio transcript. Where the distilled page differs from the source, the source governs.
I checked, and according to the records, uh, the the official cost to BP was sixty five billion dollars pretax, uh, but the, uh, independent economic study assessment, the ultimate total cost to be as high as a hundred and forty four point eight nine billion dollars when you factor in unreportable or hidden financial impacts. Um, they they initially estimated the final bill is sixty one point six billion in twenty sixteen, um, but the payments went up to sixty five billion. Again, there were other other costs from, you know, having to sell assets and so on.
Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.
All four figures verified against primary and named sources at time of recording: BP's own SEC Form 6-K states the cumulative pre-tax charge at $61.6 billion as of 2016; BP's January 2018 charge raised total costs to approximately $65 billion (widely reported, e.g. Reuters); and the $144.89 billion ultimate-cost figure is Lee (2018), 'Ultimate Costs of the Disaster: Seven Years After the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill', Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance (DOI 10.1002/jcaf.22306), which computes an ultimate cost more than twice the $62.59 billion BP reported, including $61.41 billion of hidden, non-reportable costs. One small variance preserved rather than smoothed: Hare dictated the official figure as pretax; the 2018 $1.7 billion charge was reported post-tax, and the study compares against the $62.59 billion income-statement figure. The episode and the Hayward page now carry the sourced numbers in place of 'tens of billions'.
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Correct or extend S-067 → All source records →