9 ms·

The Epic Rise of John D. Rockefeller

172 points by jl87 10y ago

dharmon 10y ago
If this short bio is interesting, you may enjoy the much more in-depth biography, _Titan_, by Ron Chernow. In addition to an incredibly thorough (and even-handed, IMO) treatment of Rockefeller, I found it an interesting perspective on the post-war period in the US.
- travmatt 10y ago
  That book was invalualable for exactly those two reasons: the evenhanded portrait of a very complex individual, and a detailed portrait of the world in which he lived and knew. That book started me on a long tear of other biographies of large individuals in American history, specifically from Reconstruction through the Vietnam War. I'm currently working through Robert Caro's multipart series on Lyndon Johnson, another awesome biographer.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    In that case it might be worth reading Factory Man, which is a somewhat biography of John D. Bassett III, third generation owner of Bassett furniture. Completely fascinating history of the home furnishings industry and how globalization completely upended it.
  - rpgmaker 10y ago
    I wonder if I will ever get to read Caro's LBJ books. They've been on my to-reads for ages.
    - Nicholas_C 10y ago
      They were incredible, especially the first book, The Path to Power. It's a fascinating story of a man from humble beginnings who just wouldn't quit and had an unrelenting desire to be somebody powerful.
- adventured 10y ago
  I'll second that book. It's an excellent read, covering his rise from almost nothing to oil monopolist, and everything in-between (eg there are fascinating parts in there about Standard Oil's collision with the first Russian oil gushers, which significantly threatened Standard's international expansion).
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    What's amusing about the book is Chernow would sum up each chapter with the popular narrative of how awful Rockefeller was, yet the facts presented in that chapter told another story.
- jhwitham 10y ago
  Titan is a great read. For a more throughout book of the oil industry there is also Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.
  - saryant 10y ago
    Follow that up with Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll and you've got a fascinating and compelling look at the last ~120 years of oil and American history.
    - samstave 10y ago
      If I were to read all of these - where will I end up mentally? In awe or in prison?
      - saryant 10y ago
        I find myself in awe. Men like Rockefeller made our modern age possible.
- aerovistae 10y ago
  Cool anecdote from Titan, one of countless: Rockefeller was relentless in ferreting out ways to cut costs. During an inspection tour of a Standard Oil plant in New York City, for instance, he observed a machine that soldered the lids on five-gallon cans of kerosene destined for export. Upon learning that each lid was sealed with 40 drops of solder, he asked, "Have you ever tried 38?" It turned out that when 38 drops were applied, a small percentage of the cans leaked. None leaked with 39, though. "'That one drop of solder', said Rockefeller,...'saved $2,500 the first year; but the export business kept on increasing after that and doubled, quadrupled--became immensely greater than it was then; and the saving has gone steadily along, one drop on each can, and has amounted since to many hundreds of thousands of dollars"' (Chernow 1998, pp. 180-81). Over the course of his career at the helm of Standard Oil, "Rockefeller cut the unit costs of refined oil almost in half" (Ibid., p. 150).
  - samstave 10y ago
    Please explain
  - coderholic 10y ago
    Version that's possible to read: "Rockefeller was relentless in ferreting out ways to cut costs. During an inspection tour of a Standard Oil plant in New York City, for instance, he observed a machine that soldered the lids on five-gallon cans of kerosene destined for export. Upon learning that each lid was sealed with 40 drops of solder, he asked, "Have you ever tried 38?" It turned out that when 38 drops were applied, a small percentage of the cans leaked. None leaked with 39, though. "'That one drop of solder', said Rockefeller,...'saved $2,500 the first year; but the export business kept on increasing after that and doubled, quadrupled--became immensely greater than it was then; and the saving has gone steadily along, one drop on each can, and has amounted since to many hundreds of thousands of dollars"' (Chernow 1998, pp. 180-81). Over the course of his career at the helm of Standard Oil, "Rockefeller cut the unit costs of refined oil almost in half" (Ibid., p. 150).
    - aerovistae 10y ago
      What, don't you like monospace fonts??
- markdog12 10y ago
  Highly recommend. One of the best bios I've ever read. The man had an iron will.
  - travmatt 10y ago
    The part that struck me about the descriptions of him was his metronome-like consistency.
  - samstave 10y ago
    I wonder, who in our day is Rockefeller - as it would seem that it might be musk but without being an asshole. Zuck is just a manipulator and as he is so young, I don't expect his actually legacy to take hold for at least 40 years. But musk is much more a Titan than zuck. Zuck isn't really doing anything outside his comfort zone - but that doesn't mean that oculus won't be a thing in 20 years - but I wouldn't credit that to zuck.
    - travmatt 10y ago
      Hands down it would be Peter Thiel. After I read that book I heard so much of Rockefeller in his worldview, I really thought it was uncanny. Specifically, Thiel's view on monopolies had some hints of Rockefeller.
    - arzt 10y ago
      Bezos - hands down, similar degree of ruthlessness in controlling all markets he touches. An anecdote from the "The Everything Store" which sheds more light below: “Bezos kept pushing for more. He asked Blake to exact better terms from the smallest publishers, who would go out of business if it weren't for the steady sales of their back catalogs on Amazon. Within the books group, the resulting program was dubbed the Gazelle Project because Bezos suggested to Blake in a meeting that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle. As part of the Gazelle Project, Blake's group categorized publishers in terms of their dependency n Amazon and then opened negotiations with the most vulnerable companies. Three book buyers at the time recall this effort. Blake herself said that Bezos meant the cheetah-and-gazelle analogy as a joke and it was carried too far. Yet the program clearly represented something real--an emerging realpolitik approach toward book publishers, an attitude whose ruthlessness startled even some Amazon employees. Soon after the Gazelle Project began, Amazon's lawyers heard about the name and insisted it be changed to the less incendiary Small Publisher Negotiation Program.” ― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
- samstave 10y ago
  That seems like the same author who wrote about Alexander Hamilton from which a lot of the research for the Broadway play "Hamilton" came from...
gtrubetskoy 10y ago
"To this day, there is little evidence on the University of Chicago campus that it has anything to do with Rockefeller." ...except may be for the campus centerpiece known as the Rockefeller Chapel where all the school ceremonies take place? (depicted in the photo right above the quoted sentence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Chapel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Chapel
- wutangson1 10y ago
  Rockefeller Chapel what with the tower that taller than any other structure on campus? Supposedly there is even a university mandate which forbids anything taller to ever be built on campus. Also, how about the commons area in the student center- i.e Hutchinson Commons in the Reynolds Club. As you walk in, along the sides on the walls are portraits of the university's presidents. But dead center on the wall for all who enter to see is a much larger portrait of JDR- with his name and title "Founder". The man whom the commons and outside court is named after and who can accurately be described as the soul of the University of Chicago- Robert Maynard Hutchins- has his portrait regaled off to the side of the JDR centerpiece. lol @ "little evidence of philanthropy."
SEJeff 10y ago
http://www.history.com/shows/men-who-built-america http://www.history.com/shows/men-who-built-america Here is a really nice historical drama that does a wonderful job of explaining the dynamics between the vanderbilts and JD.
nbb 10y ago
What do you think people in 1885 would think of the internet, where you can read some random grade school student's term paper without even leaving your desk?
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  sounds like a hangable indiscretion to me back to the good ole' dats
- yareally 10y ago
  I don't think it's far fetched for someone in the late 19th century to imagine an automated, in-home telegraph system that printed out content for someone to read. Someone might have even had their university assignments sent over telegraph in an emergency. I believe Western Union used to deliver telegrams (via telegraph) on demand for customers. Stock updates were also sent automatically over telegraph starting in the 1870s for anyone that owned a ticker tape machine[1]. There were also teleprinters that sent news stories and other information to those that owned them. Fax machines were also invented in the mid 19th Century and allowed for the transmission of signatures and drawings over telegraph[2]. The basics for an asynchronous, global communication system have been around since the 1800s, just not as cheap and user friendly as what we enjoy today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph
tomc1985 10y ago
Yes, that's what the world needs. More ruthlessness...
neaanopri 10y ago
It's shocking that they present this story as a tale of virtue. If being an entrepreneur is a noble calling, then we should be ashamed of Rockerfeller for his ruthless tactics, not praising him for it. If we want to praise capitalists and capitalism, then we should be villifying Rockerfeller for his monopolistic tactics. He was too clever by half as a CEO, since his tactics eventually brought down the ire of the government. And he felt the need to atone for his horrific business practices by charity, assuming that one of them would cancel out the other. He deserves to have the ruthless, terrible reputation the article laments him having.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > horrific business practices I recommend that you read "Titan" by Chernow. Rockefeller is mostly guilty simply of being very rich. During his career, he caused the price of kerosene to drop 70%, and stay down. This was good for the expanding country. During the anti-trust trial, Rockefeller was steadily losing market share to nimbler, aggressive competitors. There was no need for the government to break it up, it was coming apart anyway. All businesses rise and fall over time. The popular narrative that, unchecked by government, a business will eventually rise to absorb everything is not borne out by practice.
  - nmrm2 10y ago
    > The popular narrative that, unchecked by government, a business will eventually rise to absorb everything is not borne out by practice. I get your point, but there are exceptions. In particular, utilities come to mind. All locations I've lived except 1 provided exactly one option for high-speed internet. I don't see that changing in most parts of the US any time soon. Ditto for water and electricity, depending on locality. Even temporary monopoly abuse in either of those two sectors can have devastating humanitarian impacts.
    - refurb 10y ago
      Aren't most utilities gov't supported monopolies? I think the logic is that for some utilities it doesn't make economic sense to have 5 companies all providing water to a house (5 water lines underground?). The gov't gives the utility a monopoly in exchange for full coverage to all customers and pricing oversight.
guelo 10y ago
I kept thinking of Bill Gates while reading this, and not just because both of them turned to philanthropy after building their empires. The only reason Bill Gates is not richer than Rockefeller is because of the anti-monopoly legislation that was invented to stop Rockefeller. Without the antitrust lawsuit Microsoft would have been able to kill off Apple and Netscape in the 90s and kept the web bottled up within Internet Explorer in the 00s.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > Without the antitrust lawsuit Microsoft would have been able to kill off Apple and Netscape in the 90s and kept the web bottled up within Internet Explorer in the 00s. I used Netscape in the 90s. It was a crummy product that crashed if you looked at it. IE was much more stable. IE was better, much better. Opera was also available, but there wasn't much to recommend it. As for Apple in the 90s, Apple nearly destroyed itself all by itself. Check any of the innumerable books on the history of Apple.
  - guelo 10y ago
    Imagine if iPods hadn't been allowed to connect to iTunes on Windows, Apple probably would not have survived.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      I wrote and sold applications on Windows for decades. I never asked for nor received permission from Microsoft to do that, and neither did any other vender I've ever heard of. Windows was never a "walled garden".
    - rangibaby 10y ago
      It's still amazing to me how huge iPods were about ~10 years ago, considering that they are basically museum pieces now. They gave Apple credibility with people outside of 90s Apple fan(atics). The ads with silhouettes of people dancing were Apple's best in my memory.
minimaxir 10y ago
What are the sources for the nonfiction in the article besides Titan?
- jl87 10y ago
  The history channel show (men who built america), the book, a few podcasts with the book's author, and a few clips from youtube from the history channel and biography channel.
bharris315 10y ago
The Hustle puts out some top notch content. Subscribe here: http://ambassadors.thehustle.co/?ref=a3368eba99 http://ambassadors.thehustle.co/?ref=a3368eba99 Full disclosure, I am trying to get hooked up with a free ticket to their conference with this referral link. Need 15 more!
jerryhuang100 10y ago
"To crush his competitors, Rockefeller would create a shortage of the railroad tank cars that transported oil. He’d then buy up all the barrels on the market so his competitors would have no place to store or ship their oil. He bought up all the available chemicals that were necessary to refine oil." i thought it's common strategy played in AOE.... this post makes a great companion with another recent post about Uber on Lyft.
- aerovistae 10y ago
  Hahahahaha as an avid AoE player I enjoy this observation. Indeed I do always sell my excess food ASAP to drive down the price.
PhilWright 10y ago
"Although Standard Oil was eventually forced to break into multiple companies because it was ruled a monopoly, BP, Exxon, ConocoPhillips and Chevron (among others) are all subsidiaries of Standard Oil." This is not accurate. BP stands for British Petroleum and has never been part of Standard Oil. BP has bought a couple of companies that used to be part of Standard Oil.
barrkel 10y ago
Rockefeller had a peculiar face, and it wasn't helped by his alopecia episode. You can see where the lizard people conspiracies find fodder.
- aab0 10y ago
  In that one photo he looks, literally, like Lord Voldemort. That can't have helped his PR at all since I'm fairly sure newspapers were able to print photos by this point.
  - aab0 10y ago
    Ah, yes. From the source book 'Titan': "Coming on the eve of the muckraking era, Rockefeller’s alopecia had a devastating effect on his image: It made him look like a hairless ogre, stripped of all youth, warmth, and attractiveness, and this played powerfully on people’s imaginations. For a time, he wore a black skullcap, giving him the impressively gaunt physiognomy of a Renaissance prelate. One French writer wrote that “under his silk skull-cap he seems like an old monk of the inquisition such as one sees in the Spanish picture galleries.” 46"
- ccostes 10y ago
  As I scrolled through I thought the same thing. I can't put my finger on it, but something about the photos is very off-putting.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Just wanted to side-reference this comment to some of the comments about the Theranos' CEO's appearance that frequently come up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552144
leoc 10y ago
Probably no assessment of Rockefeller and his influence is complete without mention of Junior and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre .
known 10y ago
"Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws." --Rothschild in 1744 You can't beat it.

172 points by jl87 10y ago

If this short bio is interesting, you may enjoy the much more in-depth biography, _Titan_, by Ron Chernow. In addition to an incredibly thorough (and even-handed, IMO) treatment of Rockefeller, I found it an interesting perspective on the post-war period in the US.

travmatt 10y ago
That book was invalualable for exactly those two reasons: the evenhanded portrait of a very complex individual, and a detailed portrait of the world in which he lived and knew. That book started me on a long tear of other biographies of large individuals in American history, specifically from Reconstruction through the Vietnam War. I'm currently working through Robert Caro's multipart series on Lyndon Johnson, another awesome biographer.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  In that case it might be worth reading Factory Man, which is a somewhat biography of John D. Bassett III, third generation owner of Bassett furniture. Completely fascinating history of the home furnishings industry and how globalization completely upended it.
- rpgmaker 10y ago
  I wonder if I will ever get to read Caro's LBJ books. They've been on my to-reads for ages.
  - Nicholas_C 10y ago
    They were incredible, especially the first book, The Path to Power. It's a fascinating story of a man from humble beginnings who just wouldn't quit and had an unrelenting desire to be somebody powerful.
adventured 10y ago
I'll second that book. It's an excellent read, covering his rise from almost nothing to oil monopolist, and everything in-between (eg there are fascinating parts in there about Standard Oil's collision with the first Russian oil gushers, which significantly threatened Standard's international expansion).
- WalterBright 10y ago
  What's amusing about the book is Chernow would sum up each chapter with the popular narrative of how awful Rockefeller was, yet the facts presented in that chapter told another story.
jhwitham 10y ago
Titan is a great read. For a more throughout book of the oil industry there is also Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.
- saryant 10y ago
  Follow that up with Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll and you've got a fascinating and compelling look at the last ~120 years of oil and American history.
  - samstave 10y ago
    If I were to read all of these - where will I end up mentally? In awe or in prison?
    - saryant 10y ago
      I find myself in awe. Men like Rockefeller made our modern age possible.
aerovistae 10y ago
Cool anecdote from Titan, one of countless: Rockefeller was relentless in ferreting out ways to cut costs. During an inspection tour of a Standard Oil plant in New York City, for instance, he observed a machine that soldered the lids on five-gallon cans of kerosene destined for export. Upon learning that each lid was sealed with 40 drops of solder, he asked, "Have you ever tried 38?" It turned out that when 38 drops were applied, a small percentage of the cans leaked. None leaked with 39, though. "'That one drop of solder', said Rockefeller,...'saved $2,500 the first year; but the export business kept on increasing after that and doubled, quadrupled--became immensely greater than it was then; and the saving has gone steadily along, one drop on each can, and has amounted since to many hundreds of thousands of dollars"' (Chernow 1998, pp. 180-81). Over the course of his career at the helm of Standard Oil, "Rockefeller cut the unit costs of refined oil almost in half" (Ibid., p. 150).
- samstave 10y ago
  Please explain
- coderholic 10y ago
  Version that's possible to read: "Rockefeller was relentless in ferreting out ways to cut costs. During an inspection tour of a Standard Oil plant in New York City, for instance, he observed a machine that soldered the lids on five-gallon cans of kerosene destined for export. Upon learning that each lid was sealed with 40 drops of solder, he asked, "Have you ever tried 38?" It turned out that when 38 drops were applied, a small percentage of the cans leaked. None leaked with 39, though. "'That one drop of solder', said Rockefeller,...'saved $2,500 the first year; but the export business kept on increasing after that and doubled, quadrupled--became immensely greater than it was then; and the saving has gone steadily along, one drop on each can, and has amounted since to many hundreds of thousands of dollars"' (Chernow 1998, pp. 180-81). Over the course of his career at the helm of Standard Oil, "Rockefeller cut the unit costs of refined oil almost in half" (Ibid., p. 150).
  - aerovistae 10y ago
    What, don't you like monospace fonts??
markdog12 10y ago
Highly recommend. One of the best bios I've ever read. The man had an iron will.
- travmatt 10y ago
  The part that struck me about the descriptions of him was his metronome-like consistency.
- samstave 10y ago
  I wonder, who in our day is Rockefeller - as it would seem that it might be musk but without being an asshole. Zuck is just a manipulator and as he is so young, I don't expect his actually legacy to take hold for at least 40 years. But musk is much more a Titan than zuck. Zuck isn't really doing anything outside his comfort zone - but that doesn't mean that oculus won't be a thing in 20 years - but I wouldn't credit that to zuck.
  - travmatt 10y ago
    Hands down it would be Peter Thiel. After I read that book I heard so much of Rockefeller in his worldview, I really thought it was uncanny. Specifically, Thiel's view on monopolies had some hints of Rockefeller.
  - arzt 10y ago
    Bezos - hands down, similar degree of ruthlessness in controlling all markets he touches. An anecdote from the "The Everything Store" which sheds more light below: “Bezos kept pushing for more. He asked Blake to exact better terms from the smallest publishers, who would go out of business if it weren't for the steady sales of their back catalogs on Amazon. Within the books group, the resulting program was dubbed the Gazelle Project because Bezos suggested to Blake in a meeting that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle. As part of the Gazelle Project, Blake's group categorized publishers in terms of their dependency n Amazon and then opened negotiations with the most vulnerable companies. Three book buyers at the time recall this effort. Blake herself said that Bezos meant the cheetah-and-gazelle analogy as a joke and it was carried too far. Yet the program clearly represented something real--an emerging realpolitik approach toward book publishers, an attitude whose ruthlessness startled even some Amazon employees. Soon after the Gazelle Project began, Amazon's lawyers heard about the name and insisted it be changed to the less incendiary Small Publisher Negotiation Program.” ― Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
samstave 10y ago
That seems like the same author who wrote about Alexander Hamilton from which a lot of the research for the Broadway play "Hamilton" came from...

gtrubetskoy 10y ago

"To this day, there is little evidence on the University of Chicago campus that it has anything to do with Rockefeller." ...except may be for the campus centerpiece known as the Rockefeller Chapel where all the school ceremonies take place? (depicted in the photo right above the quoted sentence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Chapel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Chapel

wutangson1 10y ago
Rockefeller Chapel what with the tower that taller than any other structure on campus? Supposedly there is even a university mandate which forbids anything taller to ever be built on campus. Also, how about the commons area in the student center- i.e Hutchinson Commons in the Reynolds Club. As you walk in, along the sides on the walls are portraits of the university's presidents. But dead center on the wall for all who enter to see is a much larger portrait of JDR- with his name and title "Founder". The man whom the commons and outside court is named after and who can accurately be described as the soul of the University of Chicago- Robert Maynard Hutchins- has his portrait regaled off to the side of the JDR centerpiece. lol @ "little evidence of philanthropy."

SEJeff 10y ago

http://www.history.com/shows/men-who-built-america http://www.history.com/shows/men-who-built-america Here is a really nice historical drama that does a wonderful job of explaining the dynamics between the vanderbilts and JD.

nbb 10y ago

What do you think people in 1885 would think of the internet, where you can read some random grade school student's term paper without even leaving your desk?

cloudjacker 10y ago
sounds like a hangable indiscretion to me back to the good ole' dats
yareally 10y ago
I don't think it's far fetched for someone in the late 19th century to imagine an automated, in-home telegraph system that printed out content for someone to read. Someone might have even had their university assignments sent over telegraph in an emergency. I believe Western Union used to deliver telegrams (via telegraph) on demand for customers. Stock updates were also sent automatically over telegraph starting in the 1870s for anyone that owned a ticker tape machine[1]. There were also teleprinters that sent news stories and other information to those that owned them. Fax machines were also invented in the mid 19th Century and allowed for the transmission of signatures and drawings over telegraph[2]. The basics for an asynchronous, global communication system have been around since the 1800s, just not as cheap and user friendly as what we enjoy today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph

tomc1985 10y ago

Yes, that's what the world needs. More ruthlessness...

neaanopri 10y ago

It's shocking that they present this story as a tale of virtue. If being an entrepreneur is a noble calling, then we should be ashamed of Rockerfeller for his ruthless tactics, not praising him for it. If we want to praise capitalists and capitalism, then we should be villifying Rockerfeller for his monopolistic tactics. He was too clever by half as a CEO, since his tactics eventually brought down the ire of the government. And he felt the need to atone for his horrific business practices by charity, assuming that one of them would cancel out the other. He deserves to have the ruthless, terrible reputation the article laments him having.

WalterBright 10y ago
> horrific business practices I recommend that you read "Titan" by Chernow. Rockefeller is mostly guilty simply of being very rich. During his career, he caused the price of kerosene to drop 70%, and stay down. This was good for the expanding country. During the anti-trust trial, Rockefeller was steadily losing market share to nimbler, aggressive competitors. There was no need for the government to break it up, it was coming apart anyway. All businesses rise and fall over time. The popular narrative that, unchecked by government, a business will eventually rise to absorb everything is not borne out by practice.
- nmrm2 10y ago
  > The popular narrative that, unchecked by government, a business will eventually rise to absorb everything is not borne out by practice. I get your point, but there are exceptions. In particular, utilities come to mind. All locations I've lived except 1 provided exactly one option for high-speed internet. I don't see that changing in most parts of the US any time soon. Ditto for water and electricity, depending on locality. Even temporary monopoly abuse in either of those two sectors can have devastating humanitarian impacts.
  - refurb 10y ago
    Aren't most utilities gov't supported monopolies? I think the logic is that for some utilities it doesn't make economic sense to have 5 companies all providing water to a house (5 water lines underground?). The gov't gives the utility a monopoly in exchange for full coverage to all customers and pricing oversight.

guelo 10y ago

I kept thinking of Bill Gates while reading this, and not just because both of them turned to philanthropy after building their empires. The only reason Bill Gates is not richer than Rockefeller is because of the anti-monopoly legislation that was invented to stop Rockefeller. Without the antitrust lawsuit Microsoft would have been able to kill off Apple and Netscape in the 90s and kept the web bottled up within Internet Explorer in the 00s.

WalterBright 10y ago
> Without the antitrust lawsuit Microsoft would have been able to kill off Apple and Netscape in the 90s and kept the web bottled up within Internet Explorer in the 00s. I used Netscape in the 90s. It was a crummy product that crashed if you looked at it. IE was much more stable. IE was better, much better. Opera was also available, but there wasn't much to recommend it. As for Apple in the 90s, Apple nearly destroyed itself all by itself. Check any of the innumerable books on the history of Apple.
- guelo 10y ago
  Imagine if iPods hadn't been allowed to connect to iTunes on Windows, Apple probably would not have survived.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    I wrote and sold applications on Windows for decades. I never asked for nor received permission from Microsoft to do that, and neither did any other vender I've ever heard of. Windows was never a "walled garden".
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    It's still amazing to me how huge iPods were about ~10 years ago, considering that they are basically museum pieces now. They gave Apple credibility with people outside of 90s Apple fan(atics). The ads with silhouettes of people dancing were Apple's best in my memory.

minimaxir 10y ago

What are the sources for the nonfiction in the article besides Titan?

jl87 10y ago
The history channel show (men who built america), the book, a few podcasts with the book's author, and a few clips from youtube from the history channel and biography channel.

bharris315 10y ago

The Hustle puts out some top notch content. Subscribe here: http://ambassadors.thehustle.co/?ref=a3368eba99 http://ambassadors.thehustle.co/?ref=a3368eba99 Full disclosure, I am trying to get hooked up with a free ticket to their conference with this referral link. Need 15 more!

jerryhuang100 10y ago

"To crush his competitors, Rockefeller would create a shortage of the railroad tank cars that transported oil. He’d then buy up all the barrels on the market so his competitors would have no place to store or ship their oil. He bought up all the available chemicals that were necessary to refine oil." i thought it's common strategy played in AOE.... this post makes a great companion with another recent post about Uber on Lyft.

aerovistae 10y ago
Hahahahaha as an avid AoE player I enjoy this observation. Indeed I do always sell my excess food ASAP to drive down the price.

PhilWright 10y ago

"Although Standard Oil was eventually forced to break into multiple companies because it was ruled a monopoly, BP, Exxon, ConocoPhillips and Chevron (among others) are all subsidiaries of Standard Oil." This is not accurate. BP stands for British Petroleum and has never been part of Standard Oil. BP has bought a couple of companies that used to be part of Standard Oil.

barrkel 10y ago

Rockefeller had a peculiar face, and it wasn't helped by his alopecia episode. You can see where the lizard people conspiracies find fodder.

aab0 10y ago
In that one photo he looks, literally, like Lord Voldemort. That can't have helped his PR at all since I'm fairly sure newspapers were able to print photos by this point.
- aab0 10y ago
  Ah, yes. From the source book 'Titan': "Coming on the eve of the muckraking era, Rockefeller’s alopecia had a devastating effect on his image: It made him look like a hairless ogre, stripped of all youth, warmth, and attractiveness, and this played powerfully on people’s imaginations. For a time, he wore a black skullcap, giving him the impressively gaunt physiognomy of a Renaissance prelate. One French writer wrote that “under his silk skull-cap he seems like an old monk of the inquisition such as one sees in the Spanish picture galleries.” 46"
ccostes 10y ago
As I scrolled through I thought the same thing. I can't put my finger on it, but something about the photos is very off-putting.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Just wanted to side-reference this comment to some of the comments about the Theranos' CEO's appearance that frequently come up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552144

leoc 10y ago

Probably no assessment of Rockefeller and his influence is complete without mention of Junior and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre .

known 10y ago

"Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes its laws." --Rothschild in 1744 You can't beat it.