John D. Rockefeller

Their life

The bookkeeper who systematized oil into Standard Oil — obsessive efficiency, ledgers to the penny — became history's richest man, was broken up by the Supreme Court, and spent his last decades inventing modern philanthropy.

Known for

• Founding and building Standard Oil
• Horizontal and vertical industry consolidation
• Becoming history's first billionaire
• 1911 Supreme Court antitrust breakup
• Founding the Rockefeller Foundation
• Pioneering modern institutional philanthropy

The road they walked

John Davison Rockefeller was born in 1839 in Richford, New York, the son of a devout Baptist mother and a father who sold fake cancer cures out of a wagon and lived a double life under an assumed name. The contrast marked him: from his mother, Eliza, he took a rigid moral seriousness and the habit of tithing; from his father, a comfort with risk and salesmanship he rarely advertised. The family settled in Cleveland, and at sixteen Rockefeller took a job as an assistant bookkeeper, recording transactions in a ledger he kept so faithfully he celebrated its anniversary for the rest of his life. That ledger — later called Ledger A — became a kind of relic of his whole method: nothing mattered that couldn't be counted.

He went into the oil business in 1863, just as Pennsylvania's crude fields were producing more kerosene than anyone knew how to refine profitably. Rockefeller saw the chaos of the industry — dozens of refiners undercutting each other — as an engineering problem to be solved by consolidation. Through the 1870s he built Standard Oil by buying out rivals, negotiating secret freight rebates that undercut competitors' shipping costs, and folding acquired firms into an ever-larger operation run with the same accounting discipline he'd learned as a teenager. By 1880 Standard Oil refined roughly nine of every ten barrels of oil in America. In 1882 his lawyers devised the trust, a legal structure that let him control dozens of nominally separate companies as one — an innovation that made him the world's first billionaire and gave the English language a new synonym for monopoly.

The scale of his dominance drew scrutiny that outlasted his active career. Ida Tarbell's investigative history of Standard Oil, published in 1904, turned public opinion decisively against him, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered the trust broken into 34 separate companies, among them the firms that became Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron. By then Rockefeller had already stepped back from daily management and turned, with the same systematic mind, to giving his fortune away — founding the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and effectively inventing the model of large-scale, professionally run philanthropy that foundations still follow.

How their story ended

Rockefeller died in 1937 at his Florida estate, the Casements, in Ormond Beach, at age 97, of arteriosclerosis. By then he had given away roughly half a billion dollars and had spent his final decades as a courtly, quiet old man playing golf and handing out dimes to strangers — a deliberate softening of the image of the man once vilified as the country's most ruthless monopolist.

In their words

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Tables where John sits

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