Earl Halliburton was born in 1892 on a poor Tennessee farm, and by the age of twelve he had watched his father die and his family fall into destitution. That early brush with poverty forged a ferocious work ethic that carried him through brutal labor markets, onto ships and railroads, and finally, in 1916, into the oil fields of California. There he saw the industry’s killer flaw. Early oil wells were violently unstable.

Water seeped in and ruined them, or pressurized gas blew the drilling tools out of the hole—blowouts that decapitated men with flying steel or burned them alive. Halliburton’s idea was simple: pump cement down the well around the casing to seal it, prevent water intrusion, and stop the blowouts. But he was arrogant, abrasive, and difficult, and in 1919 Perkins Oil Well Cementing Company fired him. He moved to Burkburnett, Texas, at the heart of a new oil boom, with nothing but a wagon, a team of mules, and a borrowed pump.

He and his wife lived in a tent. She washed the cement-caked clothes of the crew by hand while he worked twenty-hour days, fighting drillers who did not believe in his method. He carried a gun and settled disputes with his fists. But the method worked.

In 1920, a massive wildcat well threatened to blow out. Halliburton stepped in, pumped his cement, and killed the pressure. The legend was born. By the mid-1920s, his New Method Oil Well Cementing Company had become Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company.

He patented a jet mixer, built a fleet of trucks, and became a millionaire. The wealth was built on extreme hazard. His cementers had one of the most dangerous jobs in America, working with high-pressure pumps and toxic chemicals on slippery rig floors. Men lost fingers, broke bones, and died.

Halliburton viewed the casualties with the cold detachment of a general. He paid well but demanded absolute, military-style obedience. He was a union buster who crushed any attempt to organize for safer conditions. Safety, he believed, was a personal responsibility, not a corporate one.

As the company grew through the 1930s and 1940s, he bought planes to fly between rigs and expanded into South America and the Middle East. His personal life was marked by paranoia. He built a fortress-like home in Los Angeles with secret passages, trusting no one but his family. The Iron Man did not live to see the transformation of his company.

In 1957, at just sixty-five, he died in Los Angeles from respiratory complications. The Halliburton family retreated into the background, content to cash dividend checks, leaving a power vacuum that would soon be filled not by oilmen but by political fixers. In 1962, five years after Earl’s death, the corporation acquired Brown and Root, a Texas construction firm run by the Brown brothers that had served for decades as the primary financial engine for the political career of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The relationship was symbiotic and corrupt.

The Browns funded LBJ’s rise, and in return, LBJ steered massive federal contracts—dams, highways, and naval bases—to the firm. When LBJ ascended to the presidency in 1963, Halliburton, through its new subsidiary, effectively became the private construction arm of the White House. As the United States escalated its involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon faced a logistical crisis. It needed deep-water ports, jet-capable air strips, barracks, and prisons built in dense, hostile jungle thousands of miles from home.

In 1965, Brown and Root was named lead partner in a consortium known as RMK-BJ, nicknamed the Vietnam Builders, and granted a virtual monopoly on military construction in South Vietnam. The contract was cost-plus: the government reimbursed all expenses and then paid a guaranteed profit percentage on top. There was zero incentive to be efficient. The more the company wasted, the more it profited.

Waste was not a flaw. It was the business model. By 1967, Halliburton employed over 50,000 workers in Vietnam. They poured millions of tons of concrete, dredged harbors, and built air bases.

The accident rate was horrific. Men were crushed by earth movers in the mud, electrocuted by hastily wired generators, or killed by tropical diseases. The company treated the casualties as line items. The bodies were shipped home, the insurance claims were filed, and the concrete kept pouring.

The darkest chapter involved the construction of the Con Son Island prison, where the South Vietnamese government held political prisoners and Viet Cong suspects. In 1970, a US congressional delegation discovered tiger cages: brutal stone pits with iron grates where prisoners were kept in subhuman conditions while guards beat them with sticks and poured lime and water down on them, burning their skin and eyes. Investigations revealed that Brown and Root contractors had built the new cells, interrogation rooms, and isolation blocks. The company argued it was simply following orders.

But the moral stain was indelible. The Halliburton name became a symbol of American complicity in war crimes. Anti-war protesters branded it “Burn and Loot. ” Inside the boardroom, the mood was jubilant.

The war had generated billions in revenue. Even as the US military lost on the ground, Halliburton won on the balance sheet. In 1982, the oil bust hit. Between 1982 and 1986, Halliburton laid off nearly 70,000 employees—one of the largest mass firings in American industrial history.

Entire towns in the oil patch were hollowed out. Men who had given their bodies to the company were discarded without severance. Pensions vaporized, homes foreclosed, suicide rates spiked. To survive the lean years, the industry cut maintenance budgets, extended shifts, and ignored warning signs.

This culture of negligence set the stage for disasters like Piper Alpha in 1988, where 167 men died in the North Sea. Halliburton was a key contractor on that rig. By 1993, the company was drifting, a wounded giant lacking the political muscle that had fueled the Vietnam boom. The search committee zeroed in on a candidate who seemed almost too perfect.

He was a career bureaucrat from Wyoming with a history of heart attacks and a reputation as the ultimate Washington insider. He had just finished a term as Secretary of Defense. His name was Dick Cheney. In 1995, he was named chairman and CEO.

Cheney was not interested in drilling. He was interested in a monopoly. He understood that post-Cold War downsizing had stripped the Pentagon of its logistical tail. The army could still fight, but it could no longer feed, house, or transport itself.

Cheney positioned Halliburton to be that help, aggressively expanding a contract vehicle known as LOGCAP. His testing ground was the Balkans. KBR built massive permanent cities for soldiers, most notably Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, with fast food franchises and air-conditioned barracks, all built and run by private contractors under cost-plus contracts. Whistleblowers reported massive overcharging and human trafficking within the contractor ecosystem.

In 1998, Cheney engineered his masterpiece: the $7. 7 billion acquisition of Dresser Industries. Wall Street hailed it as genius. But in his rush, he failed to look in the basement.

Dresser carried a dormant virus. Decades earlier, it had owned a subsidiary that manufactured pipe insulation containing asbestos. Almost immediately, asbestos lawsuits exploded—hundreds of thousands of them. The share price collapsed, losing nearly half its value in months.

Cheney had bought a cancer. In July 2000, Cheney resigned to become George W. Bush’s vice presidential candidate. The board awarded him a retirement package valued at roughly $36 million, plus unexercised stock options, plus a deferred compensation salary that would continue paying him for years.

When the Supreme Court decided the election in Bush’s favor, Halliburton had a friend in the highest office. The trigger event came on September 11, 2001. The peace dividend ended in a fireball. The Pentagon no longer had the capacity to feed its own troops or transport its own fuel.

There was only one company with the scale and political connections to do the job. In the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Halliburton secured the RIO contract—restore Iraqi oil—a no-bid deal worth up to $7 billion, granting exclusive rights to fight oil well fires and manage Iraqi oil infrastructure before the first bomb was dropped. As the invasion began, a second army followed the tanks across the Kuwaiti border. They wore KBR coveralls and drove fuel trucks.

To staff this private army, Halliburton targeted truck drivers and mechanics in economically depressed towns, luring them with promises of $80,000 to $100,000 a year tax-free. The recruiters did not tell them they would be driving unarmored trucks through insurgent territory without weapons or body armor. On April 9, 2004—Good Friday—a convoy of 19 fuel tankers departed Camp Anaconda for Baghdad International Airport. The drivers had been briefed that the route was green.

It was a lie. The route was red. As the convoy entered Abu Ghraib, insurgents with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns opened fire. The tankers exploded into a chaotic inferno.

Drivers trapped in their cabs had no way to fight back. Several were killed; one was captured and held hostage for weeks. The families of the dead sued, arguing the company knowingly sent their loved ones into a death trap. Halliburton’s defense was a masterclass in cynicism: they claimed battlefield immunity because they operated under the direction of the US military.

There were other ways the company was killing people. In January 2008, a 24-year-old Green Beret stepped into the shower in his barracks in Baghdad and was electrocuted by faulty wiring that KBR was contractually obligated to maintain. At least eighteen US soldiers had been electrocuted in Iraq due to KBR’s negligence. Then there were the burn pits.

KBR was responsible for waste disposal at nearly every US base. Instead of expensive incinerators, they dug massive open-air pits, some as large as ten acres, doused them with jet fuel, and set them alight. The pits spewed carcinogens—dioxins, benzene, particulate matter—over the bases. Soldiers woke up coughing up black goop.

The damage was happening at the cellular level. KBR knew the smoke was dangerous. Internal Air Force memos from as early as 2006 warned the burn pit at Balad was an acute health hazard. But they did not stop.

The body count of the burn pits was slow motion. Veterans returned home to develop rare cancers and terminal lung diseases years later. In July 2005, a 19-year-old KBR employee named Jamie Leigh Jones was drugged and gang raped by fellow employees in Baghdad. When she reported it, according to her testimony, she was locked in a shipping container for 24 hours without food or water.

When she tried to sue, Halliburton pointed to a mandatory arbitration clause buried in her employment contract, arguing she had waived her right to a trial. In April 2007, Halliburton spun off KBR into a separate company—a strategic amputation to inoculate itself against the wave of lawsuits and congressional investigations. Over the course of the Iraq war, KBR generated over $39. 5 billion in revenue.

More than 700 contractors working for KBR and its subcontractors died. The war machine mentality followed the company home. In April 2010, Halliburton was the contractor hired by BP to cement the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. Managers ignored warnings that their foam cement mixture was unstable.

On April 20, 2010, the cement failed. Gas broke through, ignited, and destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig, killing eleven men and unleashing the worst oil spill in US history. Executives ordered a cover-up, deleting computer simulations that showed they knew the cement would fail. They eventually pleaded guilty to destroying evidence.

Halliburton was also navigating a global legal minefield. The TSKJ scandal involved a four-company consortium building a massive natural gas facility on Bonny Island, Nigeria, funded by over $180 million in bribes funneled through shell companies to Nigerian officials. In 2009, KBR agreed to pay $579 million to settle the charges. Halliburton paid nearly $300 million more.

The former CEO of KBR pleaded guilty and was sentenced to thirty months in federal prison—a rare moment of accountability. While the Nigerian scandal concluded, Halliburton was expanding a technology it had pioneered in the 1940s: hydraulic fracturing. The chemicals used in fracking fluid were kept secret as trade secrets, protected by the Halliburton loophole, a provision inserted into the Energy Policy Act of 2005 championed by Vice President Cheney that explicitly exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Residents near fracking sites reported tap water that turned brown, caught fire from methane, and families developed chronic nose bleeds, rashes, and respiratory failure.

As of 2023, Halliburton stood at the center of a global energy crisis, reporting annual revenue of $23 billion. The human cost was paid elsewhere. The Pact Act, signed in August 2022, allocated $280 billion of public money to treat the cancers and respiratory diseases caused by the burn pit smoke. The company had successfully privatized the gains and socialized the casualties.

In July 2023, Halliburton agreed to pay a final settlement to the SEC regarding the Angola bribery scandal—$29. 2 million to a company that generated that amount in revenue roughly every twelve hours. No executives went to prison. The crime was profitable.

The executives who authorized the bribes, cut safety corners, and ordered the burn pits lit were all free men, retired to their ranches and yachts. Earl Halliburton started his company to save lives, to stop the dangerous blowouts that killed roughnecks. A century later, his company had become an engine that consumes lives. He valued concrete more than flesh.

His successors built an empire on the mastery of corruption.