> Much of that has to do with owning/having access to fleets of ships that are capable of bring you and your equipment to/from the right location on time. That

> Much of that has to do with owning/having access to fleets of ships that are capable of bring you and your equipment to/from the right location on time. That's not the only way to build an oil company. There are lots of folks who rent an on-shore drilling rig. If you hit reasonable amounts of oil, transportation appears. Sometimes it's in the form of a guy who builds a pipeline from said small field to a place with better transportation. Those are two of the many ways that folks have built oil companies without fleets of ships and the like. (It's not just "dirty work" - there are many tech opportunities in oil-relevant data analysis.) For example, the only US billionare who died this year started his oil company with $10k and a pickup.