O'Reilly Says It's Sharing Tariff Refunds With Suppliers. Its Balance Sheet Tells the More Interesting Version.

Every earnings call produces one line that matters more than the headline numbers. On O'Reilly Automotive's July 30 call, asked directly about tariffs, President Brent Kirby said the company is "not paying a lot of direct tariffs," and moved on. That sentence is technically accurate and still manages to undersell what's actually happening, because the money is real. It's just routed through somebody else's paperwork first. For scale: O'Reilly runs 6,695 stores across 48 states, Puerto Rico, Mexi