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Rockefeller was a ruthless competitor. Several Cleveland refiners claimed that Rockefeller had directly threatened them. One refiner told Rockefeller he wasn’t afraid of him to which Rockefeller replied: “You may not be afraid to have your hand cut off, but your body will suffer.” And this is the way...

169,771 views • 8 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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I read over 1,000 pages on how John D. Rockefeller approach his work. These are my top 5 takeaways... 1. He saw business as war. Rockefeller saw business like a game of chess. From his biography it says: "He studied, as a player at chess, all the possible combinations, which might imperil his supremacy." 2. He planned relentlessly before executing. As a boy he would play chess with the other kids: "When playing checkers or chess, he showed exceptional caution, studying each move at length, working out every possible countermove in his head. ‘I’ll move just as soon as I get it figured out,’ he told opponents who tried to rush him. ‘You don’t think I’m playing to get beaten, do you?’" “This part was vintage Rockefeller: He slowly and secretly laid the groundwork, then moved with electrifying speed to throw his adversaries off balance.” 3. He worked as though his life depended on it At his first job at Hewitt and Tuttle they would make him collect payments. Sometimes people would refuse to pay him. His biography says: "Sitting outside in his buggy, pale and patient as an undertaker, he would wait until the debtor capitulated. He dunned people as if his life depended on it” 4. He had complete focus Rockefeller said “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 all else?” 5. Work was religious for him He believed work strengthened his character, and formed him into a better person. He said: “I believe the power to make money is a gift from God. Having been endowed with the gift I posses, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.” Rockefeller knew he was destined for greatness.

Nic Munoz

153,895 views • 2 months ago

Billionaire David Rockefeller came from the family that ran the world for 100 years and in 1995 he explained how, on camera, smiling. His grandfather John D. Rockefeller was the richest American in history, and by the time David sat down with Charlie Rose, the family had spent a century inside banks, museums, universities and the White House itself. He had no title and no office, just 35 years at the top of Chase Manhattan and a habit of knowing everyone 200,000 index cards on 100,000 people he’d met personally. Then he started talking, and every answer was a demonstration of quiet power. New York’s new deputy mayor for development turned out to be his old colleague, and Rockefeller admitted he “did have a little to say in persuading him to come” meaning he placed a man inside City Hall and mentioned it mid-sentence, like weather. The mayor was now meeting 6 corporate executives every 2 weeks to discuss the city, in a room Rockefeller himself built through his New York City Partnership. Then a museum needed a federal building, the Customs House, and the chairman told him only 1 person on earth could unlock it the President. So Rockefeller saw the President and mentioned it, and the museum opened the very day of this interview. City Hall, a federal building, the White House all in 1 hour of conversation. Clinton was still 2 months from inauguration when this unelected 77-year-old laid out the agenda on air: cut capital gains, raise the gas tax, give business “a fair deal.” He’d founded the Trilateral Commission and chaired the Council on Foreign Relations, and presidents had taken his calls for 50 years. People built entire conspiracy theories around him secret meetings, shadow governments, world control and 10 years later in his memoirs he answered them himself: “If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” The strangest part was never the secrecy, because there was none. He told you exactly how it worked, on television, and nobody could do anything about it. He never ran for anything he never had to.

West Lord

480,744 views • 12 days ago

The US spent decades trying to break John D. Rockefeller, and the day it finally won, it turned him into the most powerful man in history. At his peak, his fortune was worth close to 2% of the entire American economy. He got there by taking control of 90% of all the oil in America, the one resource the entire economy ran on. And right now a small group of companies controls AI, search, and the cloud, and Washington is once again talking about breaking them apart. Rockefeller already ran this exact "experiment" a hundred years ago. Here's how it ended and what it tells us about the current AI situation: He started with a single oil refinery in Cleveland in the 1860s, and within about 20 years he had swallowed almost the entire industry. When people finally figured out how he did it, the country was horrified. Everyone assumes Rockefeller won because he made cheaper oil. But what he actually did was turn the railroads into a weapon against everyone else. Rockefeller shipped more oil than anyone in the country, so he squeezed the railroads for secret discounts on every barrel he moved. Then he took it somewhere nobody else dared... He cut a deal called a drawback: - Every time a competitor shipped a barrel of oil, the railroad charged them full price - Then the railroad handed a slice of that payment straight to Rockefeller - His rivals were paying a fee that funded the man trying to destroy them - And most of them had no idea it was even happening That deal lived inside a scheme called the South Improvement Company in 1872. When word leaked, the public outrage was so loud the railroads scrapped it within weeks. But it did not matter. Rockefeller had already used the threat. In a matter of weeks in 1872, he pressured 23 refiners in Cleveland into selling out to him. Historians still call it the Cleveland Massacre. After that, his playbook barely changed. He would slash his prices in a town until the local refiner went bankrupt, buy the wreckage for pennies, then push the prices right back up. Refiner by refiner, city by city, he took the entire industry. Then a journalist named Ida Tarbell went after him: Her own father had been one of the small oilmen Rockefeller crushed. Starting in 1902, she published an investigation in McClure's magazine that laid out every rebate, every drawback, and every dirty tactic in brutal detail. For the first time, the public saw exactly how the empire had been built. And the government finally moved. In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was an illegal monopoly and ordered it broken into 34 separate companies. It was supposed to be the end of him. But the breakup made Rockefeller richer than he had EVER been. He still owned a giant stake in every one of those 34 new companies. Set free to compete in their own regions, the pieces were suddenly worth more apart than they had ever been together. The value of his holdings roughly DOUBLED. By 1916, John D. Rockefeller became the first billionaire in history. The government had spent years trying to strip him of his power, and the punishment handed him the biggest fortune the world had ever seen. And those 34 companies never went away either. They grew into Exxon, Chevron, Mobil, and Amoco, the core of what we now call Big Oil. Exxon alone is worth more than $600 billion today. Standard Oil did not actually die in 1911. Its pieces just kept getting bigger. Which brings us back to now: The government wants to run it all over again, this time against the companies that own AI. They already convinced a judge that Google runs an illegal monopoly over search, and it has pushed to carve the company apart. Amazon, Apple, and Meta are each fighting antitrust cases of their own. Everyone assumes a breakup would finally cut these giants down to size. History says the opposite tends to happen. When you shatter a monopoly, the founders and the big shareholders do not lose a thing. They walk away owning a slice of every company that falls out of it. Each of those pieces gets set loose to grow in its own lane, and the market re-prices them one by one. The parts almost always end up worth more than the whole ever was. Rockefeller's fortune doubled after 1911. Then it happened AGAIN... In 1984, the government broke AT&T into seven Baby Bells to end the phone monopoly. Within about 20 years, those pieces had merged back into two giants, AT&T and Verizon, that now pull in more than $260 billion a year between them and dominate the market all over again. Investors who simply held the pieces saw their stake climb more than 600% in the years that followed. So when you hear that Washington is coming for the companies that own AI, remember what happened the last two times. The monopoly did not die. It split into pieces, the pieces got bigger, and the people who owned them got richer.

Ricardo

49,905 views • 13 days ago