Standard Oil Company

Standard Oil Company

• Founders: John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Andrews, and Henry M. Flagler
• Distinction: World’s largest oil refiner before dismantling by Supreme Court.
• Primary products: Kerosene, fuel, lubricant, other petroleum by-products.
• Founder and president: John D. Rockefeller.
• Founding location: Cleveland, Ohio.
• Market balue before dissolution: $100 million.
• Major competitors: None.
• Years in Existence: 1870-1911.

Whenever anyone mentions the Standard Oil Company, two things immediately spring to mind: Rockefeller and monopoly. The linkage is unavoidable, for nobody but John D. Rockefeller could have built this oil refining goliath—and nothing but a charge of monopoly could have torn it down. Further, the three are forever intertwined because all reached their zenith in an era when the industrial revolution was transforming American business into the global force it remains to this day.
Rockefeller didn’t run this gargantuan enterprise on his own, of course. Even a titan of his stature required an extraordinary management team to handle the socalled “octopus” of the refinery industry, which at its peak controlled almost all U.S. oil production, processing, marketing and transportation. But it was J.D., as he was known, who put it all together and ran it. Until, that is, he and his company ran afoul of the federal anti-trust laws that eventually shut them down.

But Rockefeller was more than one of the most astute businessmen of his time. Rockefeller’s estate was worth about $1 billion when he died at age 97—a sum that would be 10 times that today. A lifelong philanthropist, he gave away money even when he barely had any. He donated $20,000 to help build Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue Baptist Church the year Standard Oil was born. Over the next seven decades he also financed the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, among other charities, while funding the University of Chicago and presenting countless additional gifts to many more colleges and churches. During the course of his life, in fact, he gave away an estimated $500 million in philanthropic gifts. Yet these days he is primarily remembered by many, and none too fondly at that, for the infamous oil refinery from which he made his fortune.
From most accounts of his remarkable life, however, it is apparent that this contradiction never bothered him much.