"America's Richest Man"
by Joel Bowman
“I was early taught to work as well as play,
My life has been one long, happy holiday;
Full of work and full of play—
I dropped the worry on the way—
And God was good to me everyday.”
~ J.D. Rockefeller, summing up his life at age 86.
He died two years later, in 1937.
Ormond Beach, Florida- "When it comes to the richest people in America’s history, one man stands head and shoulders above the rest. At the peak of his personal wealth, J.D. Rockefeller’s pile was calculated to be worth roughly $900 million, the vast majority of which came from the Standard Oil empire he founded and built. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $21-25 billion in today’s dollars. Not poor, in other words. But even that number tells only part of the story…
As a percentage of the nation’s GDP, which in 1913 stood at $39 billion, the oil tycoon’s wealth represented a staggering 2.3% of the entire US economy, a higher percentage of the nation’s total wealth than held by any other person in any other age. An equal portion today, measured against America’s $30 trillion economy, would weigh in at ~$690 billion.
For comparison, Rockefeller’s closest competitors are…Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose shipping and railroad businesses helped him amass a fortune of roughly ~$105 million; a lot of money back in the 1870s. At that time, “The Commodore,” as he was known, controlled wealth roughly equivalent to ~1.1–1.5% of America’s GDP.
A generation later, Andrew Carnegie created his fortune building and dominating the American steel industry. A poor immigrant, who had arrived from Scotland in 1848, Carnegie started working at age 13 as a bobbin boy in a textile mill. He went on to work at the local telegraph office and then for the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he learned about business, management and, eventually, investing… for which he evidently had considerable talent. By the beginning of the 20th Century, Carnegie’s wealth stood at an eye-watering $480 million, a sum equal to roughly ~1.5–2.0% of the nation’s GDP.
Today, more than a century later, Jeff Bezos’s ~$215 billion Amazon fortune represents “just” 0.7% of America’s giant economy. Mark Zuckerberg’s anti-social media stash, somewhere in the vicinity of $220-240 billion, ranks similarly.
Messrs. Ellison, (~$229–236 billion, Oracle Corporation), Gates (~$176–179 billion, Microsoft), Balmer (~$161–172 billion, Microsoft), Buffett (~$150–154 billion, Berkshire Hathaway), Brin (~$138–150 billion, Google) and Page (~$144–156 billion, Google), all Americans, round out nine of the world’s top ten richest super billionaires. (Bernard Arnault & family, which built their ~$146–178 billion fortune selling LVMH luxury products, are the only non-Americans in the top ten.)
Even the richest man in the world today – the shy and retiring Elon Musk, whose $400 billion personal fortune dwarfs his contemporaries – has wealth equal to “only” 1.2% of America’s total economy… about half the size of Rockefeller’s empire, relative to the America he helped build.
Mo’ Money: Hating on the rich is, of course, nothing new… and certainly, Rockefeller had his share of detractors and sworn enemies along the way, perhaps none more so than Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. The so-called “trust buster,” Roosevelt was deeply suspicious of what he saw as “bad trust monopolies,” viewing Rockefeller’s businesses as abusive and predatory, and the man himself as the archetypal robber baron. “No man should have such power as Rockefeller has,” he once decreed, “without being held accountable to the people.”
Indeed, it was the Roosevelt administration that laid much of the ideological and legal groundwork for vigorously enforcing antitrust laws which, in 1911, under President William Taft, eventually resulted in Standard Oil being broken into smaller, state-sized pieces…
Standard Oil of New Jersey later became Exxon… Standard Oil of New York became Mobil (then the two became ExxonMobil)…Standard Oil of California became Chevron…Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco… The Ohio Oil Company became Marathon Oil…Continental Oil Company became ConocoPhillips…and so on. That most of the Standard Oil companies have now merged and coagulated into the Big Oil blob we see today is but one irony.
The grand irony, however, is that, as Rockefeller’s shares in the various spin-off companies increased in value over time, the original Standard Oilman grew ever richer. Indeed, Rockefeller would go on to become America’s very first billionaire, prefiguring Bernie Sanders’ worst nightmare decades before the Grumpy Colonel was even born and proving that, if nothing else, the unwieldily federal government is an expert in one thing above all others: creating unintended consequences.
And yet, not everyone viewed Rockefeller as Roosevelt and his meddlesome ilk did. Here’s biographer, Allan Nevins, answering some of the man’s detractors…"The rise of the Standard Oil men to great wealth was not from poverty. It was not meteor-like, but accomplished over a quarter of a century by courageous venturing in a field so risky that most large capitalists avoided it, by arduous labors, and by more sagacious and farsighted planning than had been applied to any other American industry. The oil fortunes of 1894 were not larger than steel fortunes, banking fortunes, and railroad fortunes made in similar periods. But it is the assertion that the Standard magnates gained their wealth by appropriating "the property of others" that most challenges our attention. We have abundant evidence that Rockefeller's consistent policy was to offer fair terms to competitors and to buy them out, for cash, stock, or both, at fair appraisals; we have the statement of one impartial historian that Rockefeller was decidedly “more humane toward competitors” than Carnegie; we have the conclusion of another that his wealth was “the least tainted of all the great fortunes of his day.”
Top of the Rock: The pic above, taken from the observation deck during your editor’s brief sojourn in New York City last week, showcases one of Rockefeller’s most iconic legacies: The Rockefeller Center. Construction began on the ambitious project, the brainchild of Rockefeller himself, right as American was plunged into the depths of the Great Depression. At the time (1931) it was among the largest private construction projects ever undertaken, one that brought 40,000 jobs to the city itself and which provided a shining light to lift the national spirit.
Renowned for its Art Deco designs, it is perhaps no coincidence that one of the most emblematic statues in the Center depicts the Greek god Atlas, who famously carried the weight of the world on his broad shoulders…"
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