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Billionaires: John D. Rockefeller

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Billionaires are an anomaly of society. These individuals manage to accumulate mass amounts of money in the few years life provides us with. One of the most famous billionaires to ever live was John Davidson Rockefeller. In 1870, John D. Rockefeller along with a few of his associates created the Standard Oil Company (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica). Over the years Standard Oil flourished, and eventually rose to the top of all oil refining companies. Although Standard Oil was eventually disbanded, it made JDR not only a billionaire, but supposedly the richest person to ever live. Nearly 120 years after the founding of Standard Oil, a new company was established called Amazon. Amazon was founded on May 15, 1997 by Jeff Bezos (Hartman). Amazon began as an online bookstore, but is now known as the website that sells all products “from A to Z” (Hartman). After expanding, Amazon has topped almost all markets, making Jeff Bezos a billionaire to rival Rockefeller. The reality is that the tech giants of today are the same as the robber barons of the past. Many parallels can already be drawn between Jeff Bezos and John D. Rockefeller, as …show more content…

In the 1860’s the oil industry was divided (Marshall). Within it, there were four independent industries; producers refiners, shippers, and distributors (Marshall). However, there was no coordination between these industries. Rockefeller saw this as a business opportunity, and ran with it. Standard Oil acquired many companies that each controlled different aspects of the oil industry (Marshall) Some of these acquisitions were of pipeline-based crude gathering oil facilities, tank storage farms, tank-car-loading facilities, domestic and overseas wholesale shipping operations, along with many more practices that allowed Standard Oil to dominate vertical integration in the oil industry

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The US was under heavy control of a lot of trusts that were ran and were worth a lot of money. Standard Oil had a ton of products they were producing which made them have better control on the railroad, because they were the biggest lube manufacturer for the railroads. In the first presidential election of the 19th century the biggest issue in the election was trusts. The main reasons Standard Oil was broken up was because of the Sherman Antitrust Act and Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States.

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In the 1870’s oil prices where unstable and the production was always different. Rockefeller approached the owner of Cleveland's largest oil refinery owner and proposed they unite their companies. This would hopefully level prices and even production. The companies united as the Stand Oil Company. Rockefeller expand the influence of Standard Oil during the 1870’s and 1880’s.

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Not long after his first company took off, in 1870, he created Standard Oil Co., which was a combination of a few of the other businesses he had started. Rockefeller used refineries to extract oil, rather than some of his competitors who preferred to use oil rigs. What truly helped Rockefeller rise above his competitors was actually undercutting their prices, and even offering money to railroad companies to only ship materials to him, which caused his competitors’ businesses to go bankrupt. He used a business tactic called the trust, where he took shares in other companies, offering the owners a place on the board of directors and dividends in the company. This tactic gave Rockefeller more control over his competitors’ businesses, which affected everyone else negatively.

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Rockefeller had an admiration for his integrity as a businessman and had a strong calling to his faith. His mother was a key role in his growth in faith and his father had taught him the importance of saving money. His values had always been grounded in tending to those who are less fortunate and quickly gain his respects to the business of producing oil. He had always had a fascination with oil and one of the members of his church, Samuel Andrews, who was an investor in oil. Both Andrews and Rockefeller joined together to make the business which would be called the Standard Oil Company.

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Sammy Friedman Mr. Di Bartolo Term Paper The Standard Oil Company, founded in 1870, was one of the most notable companies in American history. Its success was unprecedented, and its effects on the American economy and way of business were powerful and lasting. Founded and expanded by John D. Rockefeller, the Standard Oil Company absorbed almost all other oil companies in the country and consolidated all of them under one “trust.” It then chartered several smaller branches in different states, such as New Jersey, in order to monopolize the oil industry and create an oil empire.

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Leaders in the industry are always based off of two sections, one being a Robber Baron and the other a Captain of Industry. John D. Rockefeller and Sam Walton can both display traits from one of these two categories. Although they both play different roles in the industry, both Rockefeller and Walton have contributed to the economic and political stance of the industry today, making noticeable contributions, whether or not they had made a positive impact on their community and to the future practices of industrialism. Robber Barons are “a ruthlessly powerful U.S. capitalist or industrialist considered to have become wealthy by exploiting natural resources, corrupting legislators, or other unethical means” according to the dictionary. This form

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Lots of people might have the opinion of calling them Robber Barons but to others, they all had a decent heart inside pointing them to be a Captain of

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John D. Rockefeller Sr: How did John D. Rockefeller impact the Industrial Revolution John Davison Rockefeller Sr. once stated “If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success” (John D. Rockefeller Quotes). John D. Rockefeller was the founder of Standard Oil in which then became one of the wealthiest men in the world. Rockefellers ongoing funding as a philanthropist and trust in oil is how the man's name still lives on to this day (The Rockefeller Archive Center). For thousands of years oil has been a main resource for human consumption, and remains the same.

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Rockefeller was the first man to manufacture oil and founded Standard Oil Company. With the development of oil which is an essential resource, came great responsibility and dominance. However,

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B. Some of the most important stakeholders of Standard Oil or Rockefeller's oil company were Government and the authorities, economic stockholders, workers, and employees, customers, Competitors, and suppliers. Government: John Rockefeller monopolized the oil industry by receiving rebate from railroad companies, and forced the other rival oil companies to sell their companies or go bankrupt. The government was concerned about the monopoly in the market. the monopoly endangered the healthy competition between companies; so in 1911, the U.S. supreme court ruled that Standard Oil company violated the countries Anti- trusted laws.

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The United States economy, at the time, was prosperous but unstable due to its relatively new industrial presence. There was a lack of laws monitoring the competitive market places and Rockefeller and Flagler took advantage of that in order to grow their company into a dominant force in the oil refining businesses (Gordon, 2008). Prior to the establishment of Standard Oil, the oil refining business was a free market with many competitors and little opportunity to control prices. The industry itself was fragmented into several parts; those parts include drilling, transporting, containing, and distributing. Not wanting to venture onto other projects, Rockefeller emphasized his company’s focus on only the oil industry and its products and “by the turn of the twentieth century, he had consolidated large segments of the oil industry into a single vertically integrated company with overwhelming market power” (Pratt, 2012).

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Then in 1904 the individual parts were combined as a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company(Allegheny College).”To know every detail of the oil trade, to be able to reach at any moment its remotest point, to control even its weakest factor—this was John D. Rockefeller’s ideal of doing business. It seemed to be an intellectual necessity for him to be able to direct the course of any particular gallon of oil from the moment it gushed from the earth until it went into the lamp of a housewife. There must be nothing—nothing in his great machine he did not know to be working right…”(Tarbell). The book attracted the public eye, and eventually the government’s. Consequently in 1911 The U.S Supreme

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Rockefeller: The Captain of Industry that has helped our country thrive “The best philanthropy” he wrote, is constantly in search of finalities- a search for a cause an attempt to cure evils at their source” - John D. Rockefeller John D. Rockefeller was the richest man of his time but, used his wealth to improve our country. Rockefeller entered the fledgling Oil industry in 1863, by investing in a factory in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1870 Rockefeller established the Standard Oil Company. With the establishment of the oil company Rockefeller controlled 90% of the oil business in America by 1880.

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Thus, jobs multiplied exponentially across the nation in order to keep up with demand, and this skyrocket in American employment boosted the economy to become the largest in the world. The oil industry, led by John D. Rockefeller, was the other market that greatly aided in the growth of the American economy. Oil was another key resource of industry used not only by the United States, but also by the rest of the world. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company controlled roughly ninety percent of the entire oil industry at the height of its power, supplying American oil globally in such a way that established the nation as the one true global economic powerhouse. In fact, Rockefeller became the very first confirmed billionaire in the United States due to his success and control over the oil

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799 Words | 4 Pages

Standard Oil gained a monopoly in the oil industry by buying rival refineries and developing companies for distributing and marketing its products around the globe. In 1882, these various companies were combined into the Standard Oil Trust, which would control some 90 percent of the nation’s refineries and pipelines. Rockefeller retired from day-to-day business operations of Standard Oil in the mid-1890s. Inspired in part by fellow Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), who made a vast fortune in the steel industry then became a philanthropist and gave away the bulk of his money, Rockefeller donated more than half a billion dollars to various educational, religious and scientific causes. Among his activities, he funded the establishment of the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller

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