John D. Rockefeller

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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,…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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…”

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

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”