John D. Rockefeller’s Remarkable Rise
How he used simple principles to build a business empire.
It is difficult to determine who the wealthiest person in the world was in the early 1900s, but John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, is a leading theory. At the time of his death in 1937, Rockefeller’s wealth was approximately $1.4 billion, equivalent to roughly $29 billion in today’s dollars, according to what Tom Nicholas and Vasiliki Fouka published in their Harvard Business School Case Study. His net worth makes him one of the wealthiest people in history and a symbol of the vast wealth generated during the Industrial Revolution.
John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839 in New York and became one of the most successful and influential industrialists in American history. He founded Standard Oil in 1870 and built it into a dominant force in the oil industry, controlling nearly 90% of the oil refining capacity in the United States by the turn of the century. But was he a genius, or are there simple principles we can gain from studying his life?
Childhood
Rockefeller’s life did not start with any indication that he was destined for greatness. He was the second of six children of William Avery Rockefeller and Eliza Davison Rockefeller. His father was a traveling salesman and con artist who was…
