His business was described as an octopus, a grasping monster: “Competition is a sin,” Rockefeller once said, and he had certainly done his part to stamp that sin out. By the early 1900s, Standard Oil controlled more than 90 percent of the market. Rockefeller pioneered the monopoly, Parr writes, aggressively buying smaller companies to grow his own-”a move that pioneered modern American capitalism.” His secret deals with the railroads enabled him to ship cheaply, Parr writes. But his critics-of which there were many-probably would have said that he was stretching the definition of honest. 'I believe it is every man's religious duty to get all he can honestly and to give all he can,' he is often quoted as saying. Later in life, he writes, Rockefeller said, “I often tremble when I ask myself the question: ‘What if I had not got the job?’”

The man who headed that powerful concern was pretty weird, as genius often is. “Until he died, Rockefeller celebrated ‘job day’ every September 26 to commemorate his entry into the business world,” Parr writes.

Rockefeller's influence on the oil business even is visible today. “Although Standard Oil was eventually forced to break into multiple companies because it was ruled a monopoly, BP, Exxon, ConocoPhillips and Chevron (among others) are all subsidiaries of Standard Oil,” writes Sam Parr for The Hustle. Even Ida Tarbell, the pioneering muckraker, had to tip her hat in the otherwise-brutal history of Standard Oil that she published in 1904: “There is nothing which concerned the oil business which John Rockefeller was not on the inside of,” she wrote. People hated Rockefeller’s guts, but they also acknowledged that he was good at what he did. Its tactics were brutal and he was himself ruthless, but he also gave an immense amount to charity. On this day in 1870, Rockefeller incorporated the company that would make him almost inconceivably rich and, in many ways, begin the modern age of oil. He loved to work, made an absurd fortune and then gave the bulk of it away. Rockefeller is maybe one of the strangest of the American Gilded Age. Rockefeller circa 1900, after he had built Standard Oil into the largest oil company in the United States.

Monopoly tycoon term definition