Who Founded Exxon Mobil?

ExxonMobil possesses the most well-known, controversial, and founding story in the history of global capitalism, tracing its roots directly to John D. Rockefeller and the fearsome, world-conquering Standard Oil monopoly. The foundational DNA of the company was established in 1870 when John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company in Ohio. Rockefeller was an effective, hard-nosed financial visionary. He recognized that the early oil industry (centered in Pennsylvania) was chaotic, plagued by overproduction and ruinous price wars. His foundational strategy was horizontal integration: he bought up, crushed, or colluded with almost every single competing oil refinery in the United States, eventually controlling a very large 90% of the entire American refining capacity. Because his monopoly was feared by the public and politicians, the US Supreme Court executed a historic ruling in 1911, legally forcing the dissolution of Standard Oil into 34 independent companies. The two largest and most powerful fragments of this shattered empire were Standard Oil of New Jersey (which eventually became Exxon) and Standard Oil of New York (which eventually became Mobil). For nearly a century, these two descendants competed across the globe, building global networks of complex refineries and deep-water platforms. However, in 1999, recognizing the requirement for global scale to compete with state-owned oil companies, Exxon and Mobil executed a historic, $73 billion mega-merger. This reunification of Rockefeller's two largest children created ExxonMobil, restoring the leading scale and financial power of the original Standard Oil trust. John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839.

As chief executive of Exxon Corporation from 1993 to 2005, Lee Raymond was the principal architect of the 1999 merger with Mobil that created ExxonMobil. His strategic vision was straightforward: the oil industry's future would belong to companies with the scale to absorb the capital intensity of deepwater and unconventional resource development, the cost structures to survive low commodity price environments, and the technological depth to extract hydrocarbons from increasingly challenging geological formations. Raymond was a controversial figure, a critic of climate change science who resisted emissions disclosure requirements and opposed U.S. Participation in the Kyoto Protocol, but his strategic judgment about the importance of scale in the oil industry proved prescient. The cost savings generated by the Exxon-Mobil merger exceeded 7 billion dollars annually by the mid-2000s, validating the industrial logic of the combination. Raymond retired in 2005 and was succeeded as chief executive by Rex Tillerson.

Education: University of Wisconsin–Madison; Watertown High School. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Lucio A. 'Lou' Noto is a highly distinguished American business executive and the massively influential corporate architect fundamentally responsible for executing the historic merger that created the modern ExxonMobil Corporation. Operating as the incredibly powerful Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Mobil Corporation from 1994 to 1999, Noto aggressively modernized the massive petroleum giant, completely pioneering highly innovative retail technologies like the famous Speedpass pay-at-the-pump system. In 1998, recognizing the intense necessity for massive global scale, Noto relentlessly partnered with Exxon CEO Lee Raymond to engineer a staggering $73.7 billion mega-merger. His absolutely brilliant corporate diplomacy successfully reunited the two absolute largest descendants of John D. Rockefeller's legendary Standard Oil trust. Serving as the Vice Chairman of the newly combined entity, Noto completely secured the strategic integration of the two giants, permanently cementing ExxonMobil as an absolute global energy monopoly. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).