John D Rockefeller: The first billionaire

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Speaker 14 New York City, 1871. The Civil War is over, but its scars are fresh.
The nation is rebuilding, and behind the white marble facade of a grand hotel, powerful men are quietly plotting a bold new scheme.

Speaker 14 You see, America is in the grip of an oil rush. Fortunes are being made and lost.
Refineries are popping up fast, but with every new player, prices swing wildly. It's chaos.

Speaker 14 And for one man, owner of the largest refinery in Cleveland, that simply won't do. He craves order, control, and above all, profit.
He believes that God wants him to accumulate money. Lots of it.

Speaker 14 In that hotel room, a plan is laid out. A secret pact with the railroads, a shell company to crush the competition.
He listens, he calculates, and he sees it.

Speaker 14 The chance not just to survive, but to dominate. He won't just be part of the plan, he'll be the force that drives it.
That man, it's a name that comes up time and again in our show, is John D.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller, the first ever billionaire.

Speaker 16 Welcome to season four of Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Speaker 16 Then this season, it's over to you to judge whether they are good, bad, or just another billionaire.

Speaker 14 I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

Speaker 16 And I'm Zing Sing, I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

Speaker 14 And a slight change this time.

Speaker 16 You might be thinking, wait a second, we are going back a lot further than we normally do. And you'd be absolutely right.

Speaker 16 So this new mini-season, Good, Bad, Dead Billionaire, we are bringing you five episodes about some of the titans of 20th century America.

Speaker 16 Pioneers who may be long gone, but whose fingerprints are all over modern business. Their wild careers helped build some of the industries that made the U.S.

Speaker 16 the global powerhouse it is today, and it paved the way for our billionaires to get, well, filthy, rich.

Speaker 14 But let's rewind. Let's go back to the first one to hit the billion-dollar mark, John D.
Rockefeller. Before Rockefeller, a billion was just a number, a big number.
He made it a lifestyle.

Speaker 14 At his peak, his net worth hit $1.4 billion.

Speaker 14 Now, you might think that's pretty modest next to the likes of some of the centi-billionaires, the 100-billionaire pluses we've covered, Bernard Arnaud, Jeff Bezos, for example.

Speaker 14 But this was in the 19th century. Adjusted for the size of the economy back then, he controlled 1.5%

Speaker 14 of US GDP of the entire US economy. You translate that to today, that's the equivalent of $631 billion.
No one's even come close.

Speaker 14 So yes, you could say, Rockefeller's a good candidate, maybe to be the richest person of all time.

Speaker 16 So I only really heard of Rockefeller in actually rap lyrics. You know, Jay-Z constantly raps about being the Knicks Rockefeller.
Yeah. Jay-Z being one of our other billionaires, of course.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, Rockefeller is a name that reverberates in America to this day. There's the Rockefeller Plaza, Rockefeller Center.

Speaker 14 If you go up to that tall building, it's called Going to the Top of the Rock. You can see Central Park.

Speaker 14 And, you know, he was a byword for being rich for a long time. And I've personal recollection of this.
I had a friend who lived in New York and I used to visit him regularly.

Speaker 14 He started dating someone called Rockefeller. Wow.
And we started picking out our holiday homes in the Caribbean.

Speaker 16 You were like, we're never going to work again.

Speaker 14 Just stick with this one, my friend.

Speaker 14 Anyway, sadly, well, I think happily for both, it didn't work out, but there was a moment of great excitement.

Speaker 16 Yeah, well, I mean, I'm sure the yacht that you picked out is gathering dust in a marina somewhere.

Speaker 14 But let's go back to how he became this byword for vast wealth, the richest man possibly who's ever lived in relative terms.

Speaker 16 So he built his fortune refining oil and founding a company called Standard Oil, the first U.S. business trust.
We'll talk a lot about that later.

Speaker 16 So its structure is basically the blueprint for modern corporations. And you can see his fingerprints everywhere in companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil, Conoco Phillips.

Speaker 16 But in his lifetime, he was deeply polarizing. So some people saw him as this ruthless robber baron, which is what they called people who became rich through ruthless, unscrupulous business practices.

Speaker 16 Others described him as a visionary, as a real captain of American industry. Interestingly, Mr.
Burns from The Simpsons is meant to be partly based on him.

Speaker 14 Really? Gosh, how interesting.

Speaker 16 Yeah, you can see him steepling his fingers now and going, Simpson, you're an imbecile.

Speaker 14 Exactly.

Speaker 14 But why was he called the Jekyll and Hyde of American capitalism? Because alongside his record-breaking wealth, he was a record-breaking philanthropist. He was a devout Baptist.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller gave away $540 million in his lifetime. Remember what that is in today's money? Saying, I believe it is every man's religious duty to get all he can honestly.
We'll question that.

Speaker 14 And give all he can. And really, you know, set a blueprint for philanthropists, which we saw from other U.S.
titans and we still see today. People like Carnegie, Mellon, et cetera.

Speaker 16 It's also not a million miles away from one of our other billionaires, the disgrace Sam Bankman-Freed, who was an adherent to effective altruism, if you remember that. Yeah.

Speaker 16 That philosophy where you should go into high-powered, high-earning businesses, make as much money, and then give back as much as you can.

Speaker 14 Yeah, well, anyway, he died at 98, and his fortune was split between his family and his foundation.

Speaker 16 Yeah, in fact, over 200 Rockefellers, one of whom your friend dated, share that legacy. They have a combined net worth of around $10.3 billion.

Speaker 16 Can't believe your mate walked away from that one.

Speaker 14 Well, I'm not sure he had much choice. But anyway, that name still rings out.
You've probably seen it, as I say, in the Rockefeller Center.

Speaker 14 There's a Rockefeller University, there's a Rockefeller Foundation, all part of the legacy. But let's rewind.
Let's go back to where it all began when accumulating billions was just a fantasy.

Speaker 14 No one thought it was even possible.

Speaker 14 Yeah, we're heading back to rural New York State, 1839, the birthplace of John D. Rockefeller.
And we should say we're very grateful for Ron Chernow's brilliant biography, Titan, the Life of John D.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller, Sr., as a source, among others, for this episode.

Speaker 14 So picture, if you will, a sprawling, prosperous farmland community, close-knit, where a fervent religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening was taking root.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller's mother, Eliza, was part of this. She was a devout Baptist.

Speaker 14 His father, not so devout, William Big Bill Rockefeller, also known as Devil Bill, was a smooth-talking con man who sold fake cancer cures and disappeared for months, like an original snake oil salesman, sometimes returning with cash, sometimes with his mistress, who moved in as the housekeeper.

Speaker 16 So while Devil Bill was out there there scamming people out of their money, young John, as the eldest son in the family, became the man of the house.

Speaker 16 He had this knack for making money, which is something we see a lot of with our early nares. He sold sweets to his siblings at a mark-up, dug potatoes of pennies.

Speaker 16 He even hatched and raised wild turkeys to sell.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that kind of Tom Sawyer type ingenuity is something we've seen a lot in this series. But when Devil Bill was home, he believed in tough love.

Speaker 14 He once told toddler John to fall into his arms, but then didn't catch him, saying, Never trust anyone completely, not even me. And when he lent his sons money, he charged them 10% interest.

Speaker 16 God, I'm not sure that's how a trust for is meant to work.

Speaker 16 Thankfully, however, Eliza instilled a very different attitude into her children. Faith, discipline, and this is important, charity.

Speaker 16 So Sundays meant Baptist church and dropping pennies into the collection plate that would go around, you know, asking people to donate towards the congregation.

Speaker 16 So for John, money wasn't just for holding on to and keeping. It was part of this moral cycle.
You earn it to give it away.

Speaker 14 Eventually, they moved to Ohio. And at 14, John enrolled at Central High in Cleveland.
He was decent at school, but brilliant with numbers and was very passionate about music.

Speaker 14 He practiced the piano, it said, for six hours a day. Pretty good.

Speaker 16 Pretty obsessive. And even then, you know, he had another obsession brewing, which was...
money. So schoolmate Mark Hanna, who was later a U.S.
senator, said John was sane in every way but one.

Speaker 16 He was money mad.

Speaker 16 And Rockefeller, he once said he wanted to make hundred thousand dollars and live to be a hundred so let's see how that one plays out now back then there wasn't that many colleges to drop out of but at 15 rockefeller did indeed drop out of high school instead he signed up for a three-month bookkeeping course in 1855 and by 16 he was chasing a job with a big stable company so he used a business directory to find firms of strong credit ratings railroads banks merchants and for six weeks straight six days a week he hit the hot streets of cleveland in a suit asking to speak to the boss.

Speaker 16 And once he'd been to every single office, he would start all over again.

Speaker 14 And it worked. September the 26th, 1855, the magnificently named Henry B.
Tuttle of Hewitt and Tuttle gave him a shot with a bookkeeping job. No pay at first, just a promise.

Speaker 14 Three months later, they backpaid him 50 cents a day, which back then wasn't that much. But Rockefeller was thrilled.
He later said, All my future seemed to hinge on that day.

Speaker 14 And for the rest of his life, he celebrated September the 26th as Job Day.

Speaker 16 So he got to work, he paid bills, he collected rent and spotted even the tiniest of errors. And he tracked every single penny, even his own personal spending in detailed ledgers.

Speaker 14 In fact, he'd later criticised competitors who didn't do the same kind of thing, saying some of the brightest didn't even know when they were making money or losing it.

Speaker 16 And just after three years on the job, Rockefeller was ready to move on and be his own boss. So he teamed up with Maurice Clark, a fellow bookkeeping student, to start up a business.

Speaker 14 And that's so interesting, isn't it? Even then, saying, if I'm going to make money, I need to be on my own, to own the company, to have control.

Speaker 14 We've seen lots of our billionaires who basically catapulted their wealth when they actually took control of their own destiny, their own name, their own publishing, their own songwriting, their own fragrance, their own whiskey brand.

Speaker 14 Exactly. So they each put in $2,000.
Rockefeller had saved about $800,000 his dad loaned in the rest, but remember that steep 10% interest, more than the banks were charging at the time.

Speaker 14 Still, Rockefeller was all in.

Speaker 16 So this business that they set up was mostly buying and selling food shipped through the Great Lakes, and it wasn't all smooth sailing. So, some crops were ruined by frost.

Speaker 16 There was a shipment of beans that showed up half full of dirt and rubbish. Rockefeller and Clark ended up sifting it all out themselves.
So, you know, not a man afraid to get his hands dirty.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and that mess forced Rockefeller to ask his dad for another loan. By the end of their first year, they'd made a profit of $4,400.
That's a lot of money in the late 19th century.

Speaker 16 But don't forget, within the late 19th century, also comes the Civil War in 1861. So Rockefeller was anti-slavery.

Speaker 16 He'd even written about it in school, he'd donated to related causes, but when he was drafted for the war in 1863, he didn't want to fight. So he paid $300 to send a professional soldier in his place.

Speaker 16 Now this might sound crazy, but this was not actually uncommon for people with his means.

Speaker 14 Yeah, the war turned out to be good for business though. With the Mississippi blocked in the south, Cleveland's canals became vital trade routes.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller's firm took full advantage, and by the end of 1862, they'd made 17,000 in profit.

Speaker 16 But if you're wondering to yourself, wait a second, Rockefeller isn't known for food, you're absolutely right. He isn't.
In 1863, aged 24, he got into the business that would make his fortune.

Speaker 14 oil. And remember, it's hard to imagine a pre-oil era, but in the early 19th century, most people lit their homes with candles.
Whale oil was used for lamps or lubrication of machinery.

Speaker 14 But in 1859, the first commercial oil well was struck in Pennsylvania and it sparked an oil rush. Kerosene, which is refined from crude oil, became the new go-to for lighting.

Speaker 14 One newspaper quipped, good news for Wales.

Speaker 16 That's a very good line. Now Cleveland, which was just 100 miles away from the action and very well connected by rail, quickly became a hub for refining oil.

Speaker 16 So oil at the time was a low barrier business. So drilling rigs cost under $1,000.
And by 1863, Cleveland had around 20 refineries.

Speaker 14 And Rockefeller saw his chance here. He teamed up again with Morris Clark, plus Samuel Andrews, a self-taught chemist with some experience in oil refining.

Speaker 14 Together, they launched Clark, Andrews and Co.

Speaker 16 And at first, Rockefeller viewed this as, you know, just a side-issue business to their food trading, a kind of side hustle.

Speaker 16 But demand exploded because kerosene was even used on Civil War battlefields. So Rockefeller would excitedly wake up his brother at night with new ideas.

Speaker 16 He'd whoop for joy when he got a good deal on barrels. He was officially hooked on the oil business.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and by 1865, after a few years now in the oil game, Rockefeller was ready to bet big. He took on serious debt to expand the business.

Speaker 16 And he really did see the future, which is something that you'll find that many of our billionaires do. He realized that railroads were replacing rivers for transport.

Speaker 16 Now, Cleveland wasn't great for shipping food anymore, but it was perfectly placed for moving raw industrial goods between the East Coast and Chicago.

Speaker 14 But Rockefeller's partners weren't sure. They wanted to play it safe.
So Rockefeller made a bold move.

Speaker 14 He bought them out for $72,500 that was more than he planned to spend but it gave him majority ownership going back to what I said before control all important later he said that was the day that determined my career so he's just 25 he's running Cleveland's biggest refinery it processes 500 barrels of crude oil a day double the output of his nearest competitor and big things were happening on the home front too he'd just married Laura Spellman a school teacher and despite their growing wealth they lived modestly even without servants That was pretty rare at that time for a couple of their status.

Speaker 16 Now, Rockefeller, the man, is often remembered as a stern, serious guy. His biographer called him the Protestant work ethic in its purest form.

Speaker 14 But others who knew him say he had a sharp wit, he loved a good joke, and was a great listener.

Speaker 16 But we're not here to talk about his jokes. Let's go back to business.
Over the next few years, Rockefeller went full throttle.

Speaker 16 He expanded his empire, chasing one goal to be the most efficient oil refiner out there.

Speaker 14 He brought in his brother William to run the New York office and he teamed up with Henry Flagler, who is an oil man with Rockefeller's same eye for detail.

Speaker 16 And they built everything themselves. So barrels, wagons, even their own kilns.
Barrels dropped from $2.50 to just 96 cents as a result. They even had their own plumber to save money.

Speaker 16 So, you know, it reminds me of something we've talked about before, vertical integration.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and it's interesting this, because there are two schools of thought on this. Vertical integration is where you do all the different bits of the process.

Speaker 14 So if you're making cars, you also get the leather for the seats. All the bits of the chain, you own it all and you vertically integrate.

Speaker 14 That was very popular around this era and for decades afterwards. They sold everything, not just kerosene, but all the byproducts of oil.

Speaker 14 Solvents, wax, asphalts, petroleum jelly, but gasoline, petrol, get this. They had no use for it yet because petrol-fueled cars had only very recently been invented.

Speaker 14 So sometimes they had gasoline left over. This was the last bit.
And they dumped it in the river.

Speaker 16 Wow. Can you imagine? That's history now, like pouring liquid gold down the river.
Then came a shady but strategic move.

Speaker 16 So in 1868, Rockefeller made a secret deal with Jay Gold of the Erie Railroad, a 75% shipping rebate in exchange for locking in huge oil shipments.

Speaker 16 So this gave Rockefeller the edge of his competitors without them even realizing it.

Speaker 16 Because of the rebates, he could lower costs, he could undercut them, he could increase his dominance in the industry.

Speaker 14 And this is fundamental to where we're going to end up with some of the legal ramifications of this, which you can feel in the world today.

Speaker 14 Anyway, that deal with the railroad set the stage. By 1870, Rockefeller, a few others launched what became known as Standard Oil with a jaw-dropping at that time $1 million.

Speaker 14 The Empire was officially in motion.

Speaker 16 It's such an interesting move because, you know, we talk about America having the Wild West, but this is really the wild west of business, right?

Speaker 16 It sounds like you could just do anything and they hadn't even invented the laws to stop you yet.

Speaker 14 Exactly. I mean, what they did was they formed something called a trust.

Speaker 14 And if you look at the newspapers this week, next week, last year, you will see one or another massive corporation being

Speaker 14 sued under antitrust regulation. And antitrust means going after a company because they are too dominant and they're snuffing out competition.

Speaker 14 And that is to the detriment not only of the competition but of innovation and society as a whole. A weird thing.
You can become successful, but not so successful that you're squashing the other guy.

Speaker 14 And that drama is playing out right now with cases against Google, against Meta, against others. The foundation is being laid here of that.

Speaker 16 It's almost like financial toll poppy syndrome. Yeah.

Speaker 16 So when you nail vertical integration, controlling every step of that production process, what is next for someone who wants total industry domination, horizontal integration?

Speaker 14 Wiping out the competition. Brings us back to those secret meetings with the railroad owners, select oil refineries, including Standard Oil Naturally.

Speaker 14 Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad created a shell company called the South Improvement Company or SIC. But it was just a front.

Speaker 14 The railroads would raise freight rates, but big refiners who are members of the SIC, like Rockefeller, would get special sweetheart deals, major rebates, and access to competitors' shipping data, which meant they could undercut them.

Speaker 14 They'd even earn a profit from competitors' shipments. And the goal of all this, crush the smaller players.

Speaker 14 It's considered one of the most ruthless business schemes in American history, and Rockefeller was right at the heart of it.

Speaker 16 So, with his unfair advantage locked in, Rockefeller launched what became known as the Cleveland Massacre, buying out 22 of 26 local competitors in just six weeks.

Speaker 16 At one point, he bought six refineries in just 48 hours, quite the shopping spree. So he kind of pitched it to people like a rescue mission, like his kind of Noah's Ark.

Speaker 16 So climb aboard, we'll take the risk, we'll protect you from the flood. But, you know, let's be real, his competitors had no choice.

Speaker 16 He offered stock and standard oil as compensation, which helped, you know, smooth things over. But fear of being sent under did the rest.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and any illusion of kindness that he was doing everyone a favor cracked when the secret deal that he'd been hatched leaked. Outraged independent oilmen took to the streets in protest.

Speaker 16 Journalist Ida Tarbell, whose own father was ruined by the deal, described banners reading, down with the conspirators and don't give up the ship.

Speaker 16 So the mysterious South Improvement Company was known as the Monster, the 40 Thieves and the Great Anaconda. So the backlash was really fierce.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and one refiner recalled, if we didn't sell out, we would be crushed out. It shook Cleveland's business world.
Some went bankrupt, others sold for pennies.

Speaker 16 Rockefeller brushed it off. He said, we had to do it in self-defense.
The oil business was in confusion and daily growing worse.

Speaker 14 And by the late 1870s, Standard Oil had jumped from controlling 10% of U.S. refining to nearly one-third.
There was also a long depression in the 1870s that wiped out even more rivals.

Speaker 16 And as the company grew, Rockefeller kept dividends low and borrowed heavily, reinvesting everything. In 1874, he commissioned a new oil pipeline to reduce dependence on the railroads.

Speaker 14 And that's another interesting trait, and one I would make a direct comparison with Amazon.

Speaker 14 Because Amazon didn't make a profit for the first 15 years of its life, because any money it made, it reinvested in servers, in marketing, in whatever.

Speaker 14 It takes a lot of confidence and a lot of long-term vision to basically have money rolling in and not take it, but to put it back and keep it for another date.

Speaker 14 But not everyone agreed with increasing their debt and taking on more financial obligations to expand. Sam Andrews, one of the original partners, wanted out.
He wanted a million dollars.

Speaker 14 That was a massive ask, but Rockefeller didn't hesitate for a moment. He wrote a check immediately.

Speaker 14 He knew letting those shares hit the open market could tank confidence and their ability to raise credit.

Speaker 14 Because if you've got splitters and saying this guy's showing lack of confidence in the future, maybe your lenders will start having those kind of doubts as well.

Speaker 16 It's like the lemming effect, isn't it?

Speaker 14 Yeah, exactly. And also, if you flood the market with new shares, like anything, it can drive down the price, the value, the perceived value anyway, of the company.

Speaker 16 So clearly, Rockefeller is a savvy guy. And by the late 1870s, he has an estimated net worth of over $5 million.
So it's safe to say say John D.

Speaker 16 Rockefeller is officially a millionaire, but public anger is brewing, and eventually Rockefeller would have to face his day in court.

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Speaker 14 So let's go from a million to a billion. Now, you might think all that money would turn Rockefeller into a big spender, but no.
True to his devout Baptist roots, he avoided flashy displays of wealth.

Speaker 14 Reminds me of one of our other billionaires, Warren Buffett. Yeah.
Still lives in the same house he bought in the 1950s.

Speaker 16 And enjoys a good old McDonald's.

Speaker 14 He does.

Speaker 16 So he lived on Cleveland's Millionaire's Row, but he lived quietly with his wife and five kids. He had a pretty modest four-bedroom house compared to others.
He didn't drink.

Speaker 16 He thought the opera was too racy. He had to be reminded to change his suit when it got shiny from overuse.

Speaker 16 And Rockefeller was lean and athletic at a time when other rich men really powered on the pounds to prove that they were living that decadent A-star lifestyle.

Speaker 14 He did have one indulgence, though, trotters. Now, these are little horses, not galloping, but sort of trotting really fast, pulling racing carts.
He loved these things.

Speaker 14 And in fact, the stables he built his horses were fancier in many ways than his own house.

Speaker 16 So quite an idiosyncratic guy. and he also made some pretty idiosyncratic game-changing moves, including one that set the blueprint for the structure of modern multinational corporations.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 So on January the 2nd, 1882, age 43, Rockefeller and his partners created the first business trust. Until then, trusts were mostly used to manage money for widows and orphans.

Speaker 14 What Rockefeller did was revolutionary. Here's why.
Standard Oil owned businesses across several states, each with its own rules and taxes.

Speaker 14 Back then, corporations couldn't own stock in other corporations, couldn't have cross holdings, and states would tax outsiders doing business on their turf.

Speaker 14 You've got to remember that the state-by-state nature of the United States is something that still baffles people.

Speaker 14 To this day, if you want to open a business, you have to go to the commissioner in each state to do it. However, the trust centralized everything.

Speaker 14 It pulled together 40 companies with a board of trustees.

Speaker 14 They issued certificates of trust, which enabled Rockefeller and his fellow trustees to make production and investment decisions on behalf of each partner in exchange for a guaranteed share of the profits.

Speaker 14 And that meant that they could operate on a much more federal way rather than state-by-state basis. They could centralize decision-making.

Speaker 16 And it's the first time it's ever been done.

Speaker 14 I suppose you would describe the East India Company of centuries before as the first well, it was the first joint stock holding company, the first one that was made like this.

Speaker 14 But in the US, we had such fractious relationships because of the Civil War, for example. It had never been possible to do this on a more than a state-by-state basis.

Speaker 16 So they measured every single inch of pipeline, every brick, every asset. It was meticulous.

Speaker 16 And, you know, while this all sounds very egalitarian, remember that out of 700,000 total shares, Rockefeller had a whopping 191,700 of them. Flagler was next with just 60,000.

Speaker 14 And with that, Standard Oil was officially a monopoly. It controlled 14,000 miles of pipeline and about 90% of U.S.
refining and 90% of any market share. Well, again, let's compare it to Google.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 85% of the search market.

Speaker 14 Imagine having a stranglehold on a commodity that was becoming into its own, like oil, same way that Google had a monopoly on search, the emergence of internet search and internet commerce.

Speaker 14 It's an amazingly powerful position.

Speaker 16 Yep. And, you know, despite all that control, the public didn't seem to mind that much yet because prices of oil kept dropping.

Speaker 16 So, if the public's happy, you know, there's no kind of public pressure on legislators to intervene.

Speaker 14 Exactly, the argument that modern companies use. We give our services away for free, what's the problem?

Speaker 14 So, Rockefeller, though, wasn't a dictator. He did let his board weigh in, but he seemed to make bold calls when it counted.

Speaker 16 Like when there was a triple threat of Russia ramping up oil production, US fields drying up, and electric lighting starting to replace kerosene, everyone was panicking.

Speaker 16 But Rockefeller saw opportunity.

Speaker 14 Yeah, his trustees didn't want to touch oil from Ohio's lemur field. It was full of sulphur, smelled like rotten eggs, it burned dirty.
But Rockefeller ignored the doubters and bought it anyway.

Speaker 14 Millions of dollars worth stockpiling it and funding research to figure out how to clean that oil.

Speaker 16 And that gamble paid off. So Rockefeller's chemists cracked the code and suddenly Standard had a new steady oil supply just when they needed it most.

Speaker 16 And now Standard Oil may have pioneered the trust, but soon everyone wanted it. And so by the late 1880s, trust controlled everything from whiskey to sugar to salt.

Speaker 16 So Rockefeller really had just opened the floodgates.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and banking as well, as we'll see. His longtime lieutenant, John Archbold, put it best.
Rockefeller always sees a little farther than the rest of us, and then he sees around the corner.

Speaker 16 But the tide was turning. So critics were saying trusts crushed competition, they kept wages low, they could hike prices.

Speaker 16 And in the 1888 election campaign, both the Democrats and the Republicans went after the monopolies hard.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that same year, the New York Senate launched an investigation into Standard Oil. Rockefeller was called to testify.

Speaker 14 Facing accusations of monopolistic practices, he listed 111 of his competitors and pointed to Russian oil as another.

Speaker 14 Reminds me a bit of Zuckerberg saying, well, there's TikTok, there's Snapchat, Snapchat, there's, you know, there's plenty of others out there. Yeah.

Speaker 16 It didn't, however, convince the public. So two years later, President Harrison signed the Sherman Antitrust Act, outlawing trusts and threatening fines and jail time.

Speaker 16 Now, this sounds tough, but in practice, nobody actually enforced it. Rockefeller and many others just carried on business as usual, but that was all about to change.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it was going to bite it. And in 1892, it really did.
Ohio won a case against Standard Oil. The company was officially declared a monopoly.

Speaker 16 Other states were ready to parlon, but Rockefeller and his board moved fast. They dissolved the trust.
They transferred its assets to companies in other states.

Speaker 16 So on paper, it looked like all change, but the the same nine guys still pulled the strings.

Speaker 14 Yeah, so the structure may have changed. The power and the decision-making stays the same.
Outwardly, it seemed business as usual, but behind the scenes, the pressure took a toll on him.

Speaker 14 Stress hit hard. There were reports of a partial nervous breakdown.
He developed digestive issues, alopecia. He lost all his hair, including his eyebrows.

Speaker 14 He aged fast and looked far older than his years.

Speaker 16 Okay, but his wealth was still in rude health. By 1892, Standard Oil still controlled two-thirds of the world's oil, all the oil in the entire world.

Speaker 16 The press crowned him the richest man in America, worth $150 million and pulling in $25,000 a day.

Speaker 14 And he wasn't just sitting on that cash. In the 1890s, Rockefeller started spreading those bets.
He diversified his portfolio.

Speaker 14 He invested millions in railroads, steel, real estate, banks, ships, even orange groves. I mean, these are the the primary industries of a growing capitalist democracy.

Speaker 16 And John D. Rockefeller was about to make a dramatic pivot from building his fortune to giving it all away.
So in 1895, at the age of 56, he began quietly stepping back from standard oil.

Speaker 14 By 1897, without telling the press, he handed day-to-day control to his protégé, John D. Archbold.
Rockefeller still offered the odd bit of advice, but his sights were elsewhere. This is interesting.

Speaker 14 Not everyone, when they get to their late 50s, I'm thinking of Rupert Murdoch here. Exactly.
Wants to relinquish control quite so quickly.

Speaker 16 No, but clearly something was weighing on him because he was setting his sights on philanthropy. So this wasn't a new instinct.

Speaker 16 He tithed a tenth of his wages from his first job to the Baptist church, aged 16. Now, tithing is where you give a proportion of your income to the church, but he didn't just want to hand out money.

Speaker 14 Yeah, no, he worried about creating dependency. He believed in giving people the tools, the jobs, the education, the opportunity, not handouts.

Speaker 14 He also wanted institutions he supported to grow stronger and not be reliant on him. Reminds me a bit of Bill Gates, who didn't want to just write checks.
He wanted to try and develop, you know,

Speaker 14 programs, educational things,

Speaker 14 medical breakthroughs, all that kind of stuff, rather than just, you know, buy a big building and stick your name on it.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so in many ways, Rockefeller is providing the blueprint for billionaires to come. And with guidance from Frederick T.

Speaker 16 Gates, a former Baptist minister, Rockefeller helped found a university in the Midwest. You may know it today as the University of Chicago.

Speaker 14 Very famous University of Chicago, absolutely pivotal and central to the development of modern shareholder value philosophy.

Speaker 14 The School of the University of Chicago is one that basically preaches a mantra of maximizing shareholder value.

Speaker 14 So it's still got its fingerprints on, you know, if you talk about the School of Chicago, that's what you mean.

Speaker 14 Basically, you look after the shareholders, everything else will take care of itself.

Speaker 16 Rockefeller would be proud.

Speaker 14 Frederick Gates also helped him launch the General Education Board, which supported education without distinction of race, sex, or creed, and funded 800 public high schools in the South and transformed medical education.

Speaker 14 Big stuff.

Speaker 16 He even bankrode efforts to wipe up Hookworm, which is a parasite that plagued the southern US, which caused anemia and breathing problems.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller wasn't the only tycoon with a philanthropic streak. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie famously said, the man who dies rich dies disgraced.
The press loved that rivalry.

Speaker 14 They would keep a score of who gave more. Carnegie often edged ahead.
He even beat Rockefeller to launch a charitable foundation in 1911. Rockefeller followed two years later.

Speaker 14 You also get massive tax breaks for charitable donations in the US, so that can help a little bit.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and you also get to put your name on lots of shiny buildings and foundations.

Speaker 14 That's true, that's true. But what's going on in the business?

Speaker 16 Although behind the scenes Rockefeller had left standard oil, he still kind of was taking the heat of the press criticism in the 1900s.

Speaker 16 So he really was taking the fallout for his successors' decisions.

Speaker 14 Because Archbold played things differently from his mentor. Rockefeller had largely avoided using the company's monopoly to hike prices, but Archbold did raise prices sharply.

Speaker 14 Profits soared, so did public anger. Even President Theodore Teddy Roosevelt called the Rockefeller family a malefactor of great wealth.

Speaker 16 Yeah, there's also a great kind of newspaper comic from the time in 1904, which shows Standard Oil as this octopus spreading its tentacles all across America.

Speaker 16 And remember Ida Tarbell, that journalist whose father was one of the Cleveland refiners burned by Rockefeller's tactics, and how she reported on the protests back then. Well, she wasn't done.

Speaker 16 So she spent years investigating the company. In 1902, she started publishing this blistering 19-part exposé in a magazine called MacClears.

Speaker 16 She accused Rockefeller of ruthless, unethical tactics, and she wrote, National life is poorer, uglier, meaner for the kind of influence he exercises.

Speaker 16 I think you could apply that to quite a few billionaires today. And that reporting made waves.

Speaker 16 So published two years later as the history of the Standard Oil Company, it is considered a landmark of investigative journalism.

Speaker 14 And like great journalism, it did have an impact. It had real consequences.
In 1906, the U.S.

Speaker 14 Department of Justice sued Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act, accusing it of conspiring to monopolize the oil trade.

Speaker 16 And by 1911, it was all over. The Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had to be broken up within six months.

Speaker 14 Yeah, we could be talking about stuff we've been hearing about in the last week or two.

Speaker 14 You know, the possibility of breaking up massive, powerful companies, in particular, for example, Meta is going through this process right now.

Speaker 16 I mean, it's funny because you never think, you know, these companies are so huge and they're so powerful. You don't think, oh, yeah, they could just get broken up just like that.

Speaker 16 But that's exactly what happened to Standard Oil.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's like you said, it's sort of the corporate equivalent of the tall poppy syndrome.

Speaker 14 You like people to be successful, but when their success starts impinging on other people's ability to compete, to innovate, that's when the American sensibilities for enterprise and innovation begins to start feeling a little bit sweaty and they just don't like the look of that.

Speaker 16 It's so interesting because I think we think of companies like Meta or Google and the stuff that they're doing and going through right now as being uniquely 21st century because it's all tech.

Speaker 16 But actually, in 1911, this stuff was happening and it was talked about in the press in much the same way.

Speaker 14 So people were angrier about the trust's dominance of certain industries like steel, railroad, banking, et cetera, than people are right now about the dominance of tech companies.

Speaker 14 It was was a big thing. It was a political movement.

Speaker 14 It dominated talk at that time about, you know, how do you stop the robber barons, these titans, basically controlling entire industries, their own enrichment.

Speaker 14 That dominance attacks the fundamentals of the American dream

Speaker 14 that any person who's got a better gumption has got a chance of making it.

Speaker 14 And everyone buys into that. And literally, that's why people tolerate rich people because they think that that might be me tomorrow.
I've got a ticket in the same lottery of life.

Speaker 14 And that if you are damaging my chances of succeeding, that gets right to the fundamental aspiration at the heart of American society, really.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it offends something that's a really particularly American kind of sentiment. What about everyone has the same chance to succeed? And if you succeed, you've done it fair and square.

Speaker 14 Well, because also, you know, pioneering, if you like, is at the heart of the American, you know, to much the chagrin of First Nation Americans who basically saw everyone come in and carve up the country.

Speaker 14 But that idea of going out and driving a stake into the ground and saying, I'm going to drill for oil, pan for gold,

Speaker 14 till the land, that antitrust movement, taps into that sense that you are basically shutting off the chances for the next pioneer on this land.

Speaker 16 Well, Standard Oil certainly fell foul of that. Standard Oil was broken up into 34 separate companies.
The goal was to cut Rockefeller down to size, but it didn't exactly work.

Speaker 14 No, because Rockefeller owned about about a quarter of Standard Oil. That meant he now owned a quarter of each of the new companies, including the biggest Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so while the share price took a hit during the legal battle, by the time trading resumed in December of 1913, prices were climbing, and timing couldn't have been better.

Speaker 14 Because the age of the automobile had arrived. The Model T Ford was rolling off assembly lines, and it was powered by petrol.
Standard Oil was ready to fill the tanks of Mr.

Speaker 14 Ford's cars, and we will be discussing him in a later episode.

Speaker 16 By the end of 1913, Rockefeller's net worth had surged to $900 million.

Speaker 14 And did the breaking up of Standard Oil really increase competition? Not quite. These new companies still worked together.
They divided territories.

Speaker 14 They used the same branding and didn't compete on price. Banker John Pierpoint Morgan, you'll name better as J.P.

Speaker 14 Morgan, famously said, how the hell is any court going to compel a man to compete with himself?

Speaker 16 By 1916, Rockefeller's fortune hit $1 billion,

Speaker 16 and the New York Times officially dubbed him the world's first ever billionaire.

Speaker 16 Now, there's some debate over whether anyone else got there first, but most agree that Rockefeller was very much the first billionaire in history.

Speaker 14 Yes, so thank you, John D. Rockefeller.
This series would not exist without you.

Speaker 14 But let's go beyond a billion. By the mid-1900s, John D.
Rockefeller was openly retired. He was focusing on his philanthropy.

Speaker 14 He'd moved between his estates in Westchester County, New York, Lakewood, New Jersey, and spend the winters puttering around golf courses in Almond Beach, Florida, where he'd bought a simply furnished three-story house.

Speaker 16 But even in retirement, he kept a strict daily routine because, you know, he's a man of discipline. He'd start his day at 6 a.m.
reading the papers for an hour.

Speaker 16 At 7, he'd walk through his home and garden, handing out coins to each new employee and a nickel to every veteran. By eight, it was time for breakfast.

Speaker 16 8.45, he played Numerica, a numbers game, which is a bit like Solitaire to help him digest.

Speaker 16 And he also loved reminding dinner guests to chew each mouthful 10 times, even liquids, which he would swirl around his mouth.

Speaker 14 Weird. Yeah, weird.

Speaker 16 But also not completely unlike kind of some advice you hear on TikTok nowadays.

Speaker 14 I know, but it's so funny, isn't it? The reason I'll never be a billionaire is that I'd be out having a, you know.

Speaker 16 You wouldn't be awake at 7 a.m. unless you were awake from the night before.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I'd have pushed on through from a big part of the night before, probably.

Speaker 14 Anyway, on May the 27th, 1937, Rockefeller passed away at his home in Florida. He was 97, just shy of his childhood goal to reach 100, if you remember.

Speaker 14 The New York Times reported he'd given away most of his fortune to family and through philanthropy. By the time he died, his estate was estimated at $25 million.

Speaker 16 So that is where Rockefeller's story ends. But on this show, we also rate our billionaire on a number of categories.
We've got wealth, controversy, giving back, and power and legacy.

Speaker 14 On absolute wealth, given he was the richest man, controlled 90% of the U.S. oil industry, I think that's a solid 10.

Speaker 16 I think that is a 10. You know, he didn't splash the cash.
You know, he's far too religious for that. But, you know, I think the fact that he

Speaker 16 kind of set the blueprint for the modern-day billionaire counts in his favor.

Speaker 14 No, he's a 10 all day long. So we have a new category, controversy.
Basically, how how controversial were their business practices and what their businesses built.

Speaker 14 So Rockefeller believed in creating a monopoly and no matter the route he took to get there, it was the right thing for all, guided by God even.

Speaker 14 He once said competition is a sin and that Standard Oil had, in his words, rendered a missionary service to the whole world. Strong as this statement is, he said, it is the gospel truth.
Wow.

Speaker 16 It's convenient how business completely aligns with what God wants to do. Exactly.

Speaker 14 What do they say? Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Speaker 14 Something along those lines.

Speaker 16 I wonder what Rockefeller made of that particular verse.

Speaker 14 Yeah, so he thought he was on a mission from God to be rich and stamped out competition.

Speaker 14 And as a result, he clearly had detractors in his lifetime, the most famous being journalist Ida Tarbell, as we've discussed, and indeed President Teddy Roosevelt.

Speaker 16 Yeah, in fact, there was a governor of Wisconsin, a guy called Robert LaFollet, who famously commented that Rockefeller was the greatest criminal of his age.

Speaker 14 Even his biographer, Ron Cherno, who had access to Rockefeller's private archive and an unpublished interview with him from 1911, and it said, Rockefeller was the great corporate criminal of his age.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller always claimed that much of what happened with Standard Oil had either never happened or had been done by underlings. I was able to show that he masterminded it.

Speaker 14 To that extent, he comes off worse.

Speaker 16 This is an interesting one because I have to admit that when you look at Rockefeller's story with the eyes of today, you think to yourself, Oh, this just always happens now, doesn't it?

Speaker 16 Yeah, yeah, people get away with this stuff all the time.

Speaker 14 The Cleveland massacre, I think, is an important moment because that's when he realized that if he was going to have a stranglehold on this, he needed to buy what he bought twenty-two out of the twenty-six companies, something like that.

Speaker 14 That was a very naked grab for monopoly. And he listened, he's unapologetic about it, right? Yeah, you know, competition is a sin after all.
So there we go. So, yeah, I mean, that is controversial.

Speaker 14 And by the way, you know, his behavior and those of his trust colleagues, that is why we have the legislation we have today.

Speaker 14 So he basically, you know, his movement actually inspired the legislative response to it. So it is by definition controversial because it spawned law.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that is true. I think I'm going to give him an 8 out of 10.

Speaker 14 Yeah, no, solid 8 from me as well on controversy. Giving back.
Well.

Speaker 16 Well, he did a lot to give back.

Speaker 14 And, you know, it's kind of funny when you hear the way that people like him and Carnegie talk about the importance of giving back to society you don't really hear many people talk about wealth in that way anymore no I wonder whether because Carnegie was quite a religious man as well I wonder whether it's a kind of an absolution of sorts for amassing that kind of wealth it's your way of going into the confessional and saying, really sorry, I've got so rich.

Speaker 16 Yeah, well, it reminds me of one of our other billionaires from the first series, Chuck Feeney, who came from an Irish Catholic background, so also religious, and ended up giving away all of it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, God is watching.

Speaker 16 Yeah, well, interestingly, Rockefeller was famous for handing out dimes to children, and people think he gave out $35,000 in dimes to kids on the street.

Speaker 14 And Rockefeller, along with Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie, they revolutionized the model for philanthropy, and billionaires have followed ever since.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller's approach is slightly different to Carnegie's. Carnegie donated directly to institutions or buildings, libraries, sports halls, music, venues.

Speaker 14 Rockefeller funded education and medical research that would lead to generalised benefits. So much more of a Bill Gates kind of approach.
He scorned any charity that smacked of social welfare.

Speaker 14 Instead of giving alms to beggars, if anything can be done to remove the causes which lead to the existence of beggars, then something deeper and broader and more worthwhile will have been accomplished, he said.

Speaker 16 But, you know, let's also acknowledge the fact that Rockefeller believed that the rich were rich because they had superior intelligence and enterprise.

Speaker 16 Interestingly, he said, the failures that a man makes in his life are due almost always to some defect in his personality.

Speaker 14 That is fascinating.

Speaker 16 So the more Rockefellers we can create, the richer society will be.

Speaker 14 Not only that, but being poor is your fault.

Speaker 16 It's a personal failing.

Speaker 14 It is actually a sign of failing either morally, intellectually, spiritually, and to this day, in a way, being poor is a sin in America. So giving back, I'm going to have to give him at least a nine.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think Chuck Feeney was maybe the first and only 10 we've ever given.

Speaker 14 Okay, because he gave it all away. Yes.
Nine for me on giving back.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean nine for me. He really sort of redeems himself here, I think.

Speaker 14 Power and legacy is another of our categories.

Speaker 14 Obviously, he wielded almost ultimate power over corporate America in his lifetime by controlling 90% of the oil industry at the time when it was emerging all its power.

Speaker 14 He led to the creation of antitrust laws. So I would say his legacy is absolutely massive.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's huge. I mean, he wasn't actually that involved in politics, but you have to think, would there be the shape of American business as it is now without John D.
Rockefeller?

Speaker 16 And I don't think there would.

Speaker 14 I think he was definitely a trailblazer for how America thought about corporate power, how they responded to overweening corporate power.

Speaker 14 And I mean, if he didn't get involved in politics, I mean, that was his own choice. What did one of his classmates say? He was sane in most regards, but he was money mad.

Speaker 14 Money was more important to him than power yeah and also you know arguably he didn't need politics no like he was plenty capable of dominating just on his own yeah um so power and legacy it's another high mark isn't it rockefeller plazi he's still with us in many ways so i'm going to give him an eight for power and legacy oh really i would actually give him i think i would give him a 10 you know

Speaker 14 i'm just trying to think yeah and of all of those people, you know, you think of Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Mellon. Rockefeller's the king of them all.

Speaker 14 So, all right, I'm going to give him a nine for legacy.

Speaker 16 Yeah, you don't get Jay-Z shouting out Carnegie in his songs, I'm afraid.

Speaker 16 Rockefeller, it's got swag, it's got beat, it's got rhythm.

Speaker 14 Okay, so good, bad, or just another billionaire.

Speaker 16 Well, now for the first time ever, it's over to you, dear listeners. We want to know how you would judge John D.

Speaker 16 Rockefeller or any of the other billionaires we've covered on Good, Bad, Billionaire and any of the other American pioneers we'll be covering on this mini-season.

Speaker 16 We've got Motorman Henry Ford, original eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and Walmart founder Sam Walton.

Speaker 14 So please share your thoughts, your judgments with us by emailing goodbadbillionaire or one word at bbc.com. Or drop us a text or WhatsApp or voice note to 001-917-686-1176.

Speaker 14 Let me give you that again. 001-917-686-1176.

Speaker 16 So let us know know what you think about John D. Rockefeller and the rest of our billionaires in this special mini-season.
Good, bad, dead billionaire.

Speaker 14 We might feature your voice note or comment, so don't forget to share your name with us.

Speaker 16 We've already been getting some emails in. We've had some great ones.
Dear Good, Bad Billionaire, I'm Karen and I'm 14. I'm from India.
I've been listening since I was 13. I adore your podcast.

Speaker 16 And Mr. Simon Jack's Cluelessness and Pop Culture Sing is Wonderful.
Thanks, Karen.

Speaker 16 I love this podcast.

Speaker 16 More emails emails like that, please.

Speaker 16 Who have we got next episode? So, we've got a man who is really on the cutting edge of a brand new piece of technology, something that we all take for granted today. The humble four-wheeled car.

Speaker 16 That's Henry Ford, the motorman, the man who, 99 years into the 20th century, was named the businessman of the century by Fortune magazine.

Speaker 14 And not only did he put America on four wheels, he changed manufacturing processes forever.

Speaker 14 He invented or perfected the assembly line with huge results for manufacturing not just in the US but around the world.

Speaker 16 That's Henry Ford on Good Bad Billionaire.

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