John D. Rockefeller

John Davison Rockefeller was born in Richford, New York in 1839, the son of a traveling patent medicine salesman and a devoutly religious mother. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio as a teenager and began his business career as a bookkeeper, developing a meticulous attention to financial detail that would characterize his approach to business throughout his life. He entered the oil industry in 1863 as an investor in a Cleveland refinery, recognizing that the refining of crude oil, rather than its volatile and unpredictable extraction, represented a more controllable and scalable business opportunity.

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.