John D. Rockefeller

“She kept her own ledger, and she taught her children that every dollar was held in trust whether anyone was watching or not.”

“We will let it simmer, she would routinely say. It was her standing counsel against deciding anything in haste, and John D. Rockefeller would use those exact words to outmaneuver and outweigh Wall Street tycoons and independent refiners for the next 70 years.”

“He loaned them money at the going rate of interest, showing them that they could do it too. But then, after they absorbed that lesson and tried it out for themselves, he'd go one step further and call in his loans to them suddenly, when they least expected it,…”

“He had saved enough money to buy candy by the pound and then sell it piece by piece to his siblings at marked-up prices, keeping his profits in a little box on the mantle.”

“He added with some pride that he had loaned out money and got interest on it before he was 14 years old, and I knew well how to make out a note. My father taught me these things.”

“For the rest of his life, every September the 26th, a flag flew over his house. Job day.”

“Decades later, as an old man with yearly income well past three million dollars, or more than fifty million dollars today, Rockefeller caught an error of 10 dollars and eight cents in a railroad's payment to him. He had his secretary write a letter asking for …”

“The official bill on a railroad shipment always showed a fixed rate, the same rate the railroad printed on the public schedule for everyone to see and what Rockefeller assumed, at first, everyone would pay. But the right kind of shipper, after he had moved eno…”

“He had already figured out that if the return on borrowed money exceeded the cost of the loan, Then the rational move was to borrow more. Interest was just the price of growth, and the more you grew, the more you could borrow again.”

“The refiner had control sitting at the choke point between the raw material and the customer.”

“A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than our business founded on friendship.”

“Ask anyone today who built Standard Oil, and people will say Rockefeller. They should say Rockefeller and Flagler. The company could not have grown nearly as large without both of them.”

“The Standard Oil Company will someday refine all of the oil and make all of the barrels.”

“It is to be remembered that oftentimes the most difficult competition comes not from the strong, intelligent, conservative competitor, but from the man who is holding on by the eyelids, is ignorant of his costs, and anyway has got to keep running or bust.”

“He had a telegraph wire run between his office and his house so he could spend three or four afternoons a week at home, Planting trees and playing with his kids, all the while he kept one of the largest companies on earth humming along down the road.”

“The children had no idea that their jolly grandfather was now living under a false name in Illinois with a second wife who knew nothing of their existence.”

“When a newspaper that year guessed his fortune, it said five million dollars, and he didn't correct them. He never did. But we know now that a standard oil stock alone at the time was worth about eighteen million.”

“I suspect that because he was such a focal point for the public attention, the company was able to keep going for decades.”

“This one magazine writer did more to damage John D. Rockefeller than every senator, investigator, and ranting reporter combined”

“And in time, he would keep a rotation of wigs, Cut to different lengths, which he wore in sequence over the weeks so that his hair seemed to grow longer and then be freshly trimmed.”

“If she is right, we will not gain anything by answering, and if she is wrong, time will vindicate us.”

“The world is full of socialists and anarchists. Whenever a man succeeds remarkably in any particular line of business, they jump on him and cry him down. And the crowd is always ready to help tear down a successful man.”

“In 1910, Junior made his decision and resigned from the board of Standard Oil and stepped away from the business side for good. His real life's work would be the other machine, the giving one. Over the next half century, he moved more than a billion dollars of…”

“When they inventory Seti's wardrobe, it told its own story of their lifestyle. The wife of the richest man on earth had owned almost nothing of value. The costliest thing in her closet was a sealskin coat appraised at a 150 dollars.”

“If you could only ship by water, you could only ship when the lake wasn't frozen. If you could only ship by rail, the railroad dictated your rates, but when you could play them off one another, you actually got much lower rates.”

“Not only do I think that was a key to how quickly and fast they rolled everything up, but it probably enabled them to keep going a lot longer than they otherwise would have, because it took so long to figure out what was going on.”

“So this is how Rockefeller swallowed 23 companies in 28 days. 18 owners took cash. Five took stock in Standard Oil.”

“And somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. I mean, He's created, he and people like Rockefeller, they're lambasted as the villains when they are the greatest heroes that have ever, ever…”

“Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things fail because we lack concentration. The art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else.”

“And Rockefeller would only meet with Vanderbilt if Vanderbilt came to Cleveland and met Rockefeller inside of his office.”

“Many employees said that he never lost his temper, raised his voice, uttered a profane word or acted discourteously.”

“Find a problem. Work at it, solve it as well as I can, put the administration of that problem in good hands, and then go on to the next one.”

“Now, another trait that Rockefeller had is this maxim that says the good ones, no more. This is not an issue of talent or intelligence. This is an issue of effort. They just collect more information. They know more about what they're doing.”

“There is no standard oil monopoly without this happening. Since they are shipping commodities all over the country, this is before he gets into the oil business. Obviously he has to study the business of transportation. The business of transportation is going …”

“So when he gets into the oil refining business, it has no barriers to entry costs about a thousand dollars to start a refinery and only requires a few people to run it.”

“Shipping by water was 50% cheaper than shipping by rail.”

“A few weeks later, the newspapers announced his new partnership, revealing who had backed his bid, and the news that Rockefeller is, at 25 years old, an owner of one of the largest refineries in the world.”

“He wanted to collect information and never give any information. He sat quiet in meetings. He encouraged his partners to quote, let the other fellow talk.”

“Rockefeller collected more information than anybody else. He studied all sides of the oil industry. He traveled to the oil regions and got to know the business from that end. He talked to producers, the men who drew oil from the ground, to the people that carr…”

“Rockefeller gives Flagler one job. You see how he keeps doing this over and over again. You are going to focus on your top priority. What does he want Flagler to focus on? Concentrate fully on our highest priority transportation. Flagler had a single objective…”

“The final element in Rockefeller, Rockefeller strategy is that only a fraction of the profits would be distributed as dividends among the five stockholders. He wanted the rest retained in the business.”

“It is impossible to comprehend Rockefeller's breathtaking ascent without realizing that he always moved into battle backed by abundant cash. Whether writing out downturns or coasting on booms, he kept plentiful reserves and won many bidding contests simply bec…”

“So even though later on Rockefeller would say that he despised speculators early in his career, he speculated in oil futures and he may have not survived if he didn't do this. And speculating oil futures is a very tricky business. And it was so important to hi…”

“So when they think about who to target for the largest possible rebates, they concentrate on the Erie railroad. Why? Because it was one of the smaller railroads at the time and therefore more hungry for traffic. This deal at Rockefeller is going to work out wi…”

“So these rebates are adding 50,000 dollars a year in profit each year at a time when most other refiners Couldn't even break even. Most of them were losing money.”

“Rockefeller's company is refining about 1500 barrels a day, but they're shipping 4200 barrels a day.”

“He approaches a guy named Oliver Payne, and he offers to buy his company for 400,000 dollars and to give him a position in Standard Oil. The company was only worth 250,000, but Payne came from a politically connected family in Cleveland, and Payne's connection…”

“Rockefeller would buy the companies, but you'd have them operate as if nothing had changed. They'd keep the same name. No connection to standard would ever be revealed publicly. The hidden company was a technique that Standard would use to build its empire. Th…”

“When there was a boycott organized by companies taking crude out of the ground against Rockefeller, they essentially shut off his supplies to his raw materials. This goes on for several months. It's so drastic. It takes standard oil's employee count from 1200 …”

“In fact, the information he gets from this association helps him become a monopoly. And so Rockefeller's actually chosen to be the head of the association. That's really important because then he gets to know every single business. He has to see their books. H…”

“Regardless of where he was in the world, every day he received a sheet that listed how much crude oil they had on hand, the number of barrels, the total number of gallons of refined that were shipped the previous day and any other vital statistic of the busine…”

“Standard Oil had secretly approached Tweedle and told them that they will cover all the legal costs when Tweedle gets sued for patent infringement, which indeed happens. They then purposely drag the case through the court slowly to bleed the smaller company. E…”

“Rockefeller would tell his partners, concentrate first on the largest and strongest independent with him secured. The balance can be brought in easily.”

“He would cut the price of refined to below costs, knowing that every sale is now competitor had to drop the price to meet only hasten their demise. He would keep the prices low until he broke the competitors that didn't want to consolidate or sell.”

“So standard oil sold over 50 byproducts from the refining of oil. Standard did not create a single one of those innovations. Rockefeller would let others experiment. He'd wait until they developed a profitable market, and then he would move in.”

“Someone once said Bill wants people to think that he is Thomas Edison when he is really Rockefeller. If he was Edison, he would be less dangerous. He is utterly relentless. He is indefatigable. He is absolutely focused, and he wants it all.”

“Rockefeller's likely the richest person on in the world at the time he retired, but he actually got richer and wealthier in retirement than he did when he was working because somebody else invented a technology that created more demand for his product.”

“They all have in common that they invest in technology, the savings compound, and it could be gives you an advantage over slower moving competitors, and it could be a, the difference between a profit and a loss, and if you go back and look at Rockefeller, Carn…”

“When I went to Charlie Munger's house and got, got to have dinner with him, he actually said that he thought Rockefeller was the greatest entrepreneur of all time.”

“Rockefeller made more money in retirement from his oil stocks because Henry Ford invented the model T invented the mass production of automobiles, which then what does that do drastically increase the demand for Rockefeller's product?”