On April 9, 1865, the American Civil War ended, and the abolitionist forces of the North defeated the proponents of Southern plantation slavery, paving the way for the future development of the United States.
After the end of the war, the United States showed great potential for development, and talent and adventurers from all over the world flocked to it. With the beginning of the second industrial revolution, the development and utilization of new resource oil has provided infinite possibilities for social progress, and many oil exploitation enterprises have come into being, and a number of large entrepreneurs have emerged in the oil field.
One of the best is John Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil.
Rockefeller, known as the "oil king", had already shown his business talent as a teenager. He was born on July 9, 1839, in a small town on the Hudson River in New York, USA, where his father was a itinerant trader who amassed his first pot of gold by reselling land and salt.
Under the influence of this family, Rockefeller developed a strong interest in business, and although he dropped out of high school, he decided to go to Cleveland and found a job in a foreign trade company.
During his time in a foreign trading company, he showed his unique business talent, and with his keen business sense, he foresaw a large-scale famine in England in the short term, so he decisively bought a large amount of wheat and ham, which was a great success.
This is enough to prove that Rockefeller's success was not accidental, and his business talent was already emerging as a teenager.
However, when Rockefeller asked his boss to give him a raise to $800 a year, he was flatly rejected by his boss. Feeling lost, Rockefeller decided to resign.
When he returned home, he told his father about his ordeal, and hoped that he would lend him $1,000, plus a few hundred dollars he had saved up himself, so that he could start a company with his British friend Clark.
Soon, a "Clark Rockefeller Company" with an initial capital of $4,000 was successfully opened. Their main business is to deal in meat, wheat, forage and other agricultural products, and their main customers are from the United Kingdom and Germany.
At that time, Rockefeller was only 20 years old.
In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, the demand for meat and other subsistence supplies surged, and the daily necessities** soared, and Rockefeller's orders flew like snowflakes. In just 4 years, he made a fortune of $100,000 and successfully stepped into the ranks of the rich.
After the rich party, Rockefeller was no longer satisfied with such a small business as agricultural products.
After the end of the Civil War, Pennsylvania discovered its oil resources, and like the gold rush, thousands of merchants flocked to the oil extraction area. Rockefeller was so concerned about this phenomenon that as a representative of the Cleveland business community, he decided to personally visit Pennsylvania's oil production areas to investigate the ecology of the oil industry.
When he arrived at the scene, he was disappointed by what he saw. Disorganized equipment and dilapidated wooden houses fill the entire oil-producing region. After witnessing all this, Rockefeller had a deep understanding of the current state of the oil industry.
He believes that the current blind exploitation and lack of scientific planning have caused immeasurable damage to the entire oil industry.
After a year and a half, Rockefeller's prediction finally came true: the United States*** began to plummet, from $2 to $0 a gallon$22, and then despite the fact that oil producers united to raise the price, it still could not stop the downward trend in oil prices.
Buyers on all sides are taking a wait-and-see attitude towards oil, leading to further oil prices, even as low as a staggering 0$13 per gallon. When oil prices hit rock bottom, Rockefeller was keenly aware of this was a good opportunity, and he began to prepare his own refining company.
He is well aware that in addition to the oversupply caused by large extraction, low-quality oil is also one of the main reasons for the price of oil.
In order to solve the problem of large-scale exploitation of low-quality oil, Rockefeller hired Andrews, who specialized in oil mother rocks, from the United Kingdom. The two hit it off and co-founded the Rockefeller-Andrews Company, which focused on oil extraction and refining.
With Andrews' help, the business empire Rockefeller was strengthened and quickly became the best of the American oil companies. Other companies in the market regard Rockefeller's first-class products as a symbol of quality assurance.
However, Rockefeller was not satisfied with the status quo, and he decided to expand the size of the refinery equipment to increase production to 500 barrels per day.
In just two years, Rockefeller's fortune increased by $1.2 million, and the company's strength increased dramatically, even moving its headquarters to New York's Broadway, where every inch of land is scarce.
A new chapter was opened for the Rockefeller oil industry. Although his company was already the largest refining company in the United States by this time, his ambitions went far beyond that, and his ultimate goal was to control the entire American refining industry.
However, how to control the entire refining industry has become a major problem for him. If you engage in a direct business war with a competitor, you may win, but the losses you will suffer will be huge.
After careful consideration, Rockefeller decided to make a breakthrough from the oil transportation link. At that time, in order to compete for the big cake of the oil logistics market, many railway companies, including Hubin Railway and Pennsylvania Railway, were actively competing.
In the face of the current market situation, Rockefeller took decisive action, he approached the chairman of the Lakeside Railway Company, and offered to charter all the oil tankers and carriages of the company's upstream and downstream transportation industry, but at the same time demanded that the transportation cost of each barrel of oil be reduced by 7 cents, and the long-distance transportation cost on the east coast should also be reduced by 5 cents.
Although the chairman of the lakeside railway was inevitably distressed by the reduction of unit fees, considering the amount of oil transported by 60 wagons per day, he finally signed the contract happily.
Seeing that the Lakeside Railway took the lead in reaching an agreement with Rockefeller, other railway companies also hoped to join this mutually beneficial business alliance and threw olive branches to Rockefeller.
After many discussions, Rockefeller managed to reach a secret agreement with the Union of Transportation Companies. The agreement stipulates that all railroad companies participating in the Rockefeller Business Alliance must provide transportation services in accordance with market minimums**.
Once the agreement was signed, Rockefeller immediately gained a unique logistical advantage and quickly became a leader in the U.S. refining industry. This kind of self-financing behavior with logistics companies forced other refiners to pay higher costs, and eventually forced them to give in to Rockefeller.
After taking control of refining and transportation, Rockefeller set his sights on the upstream oil extraction industry. He approached the president of the Federation of Petroleum Extraction Industries of the states and promised to pay 4$75 for the purchase of oil and payment in cash.
This news immediately attracted the attention of major oil extraction companies, who immediately increased their horsepower and frantically built new oil wells, forming a two-week "blowout" phenomenon.
Two weeks later, Rockefeller announced that it had decided to reduce the original acquisition** to 2. per barrel due to problems with the company's capital chain$5. This is a cunning tactic, as many oil extraction companies borrow large sums of money from banks and private individuals in order to cooperate with Rockefeller.
However, when Rockefeller announced a price cut, these oil extractors immediately fell into serious debt distress, and many chose to end their lives with guns. And the oil extraction equipment they left behind was bought by Rockefeller at a very low **.
When Rockefeller brought oil extraction companies under his umbrella, the Franco-Prussian War broke out on the European continent, and the spread of the war not only led to the shrinkage of the US oil export market, but also led to a large increase, and many small and medium-sized enterprises that relied on oil for their lives were miserable.
Rockefeller saw the opportunity and quickly reached an agreement with the major US banks, which stopped lending to small and medium-sized refiners, and the pace of debt collection accelerated.
This series of operations led to the rupture of the capital chain of small and medium-sized oil companies, and eventually they went bankrupt and became subsidiaries of the Rockefeller Corporation. From the upstream of oil development, to the midstream of oil logistics, and then to the downstream of oil refining and sales, Rockefeller completed the layout of the entire oil industry in only nine years.
In 1870, Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was formally established, and the reason why it was called "Standard" was because Rockefeller regarded himself as the standard and benchmark of the entire oil industry, and all enterprises that obeyed him would prosper, otherwise they would be eliminated by him.
According to statistics, at its peak, Standard Oil monopolized 95% of the refining capacity, 90% of the oil transportation and nearly half of the oil extraction in the United States.
In the United States, Rockefeller led the country into the era of monopoly. With the introduction of the U.S. antitrust law and the splitting of Standard Oil into multiple companies, Rockefeller realized that only by having influence could the family business be ensured.
As a result, Rockefeller began to develop a plan for the family, requiring the children to be involved not only in business, but also in the fields of law and politics. After Rockefeller's death, his descendants successfully embarked on the road of combining politics and business according to his philosophy.
Despite suffering from severe dyslexia, Nelson Rockefeller relied on his talent to serve four consecutive terms as governor of New York and even served as a deputy in Nixon.
However, unlike Nelson's path into politics, Rockefeller's third son, David, chose a different path, and as the third-generation head of the business empire, Davy's chances of associating with the most powerful politicians were actually no less than Nelson's.
According to relevant sources, during the period when David was in charge of the family business, the Rockefeller family almost became the driving force behind the successive American leaders, invisibly controlling the country's internal affairs.
While the Rockefeller family has surged its family wealth dozens of times through the combination of politics and business and a series of means, it has also woven a huge network of financial industries, and its influence has penetrated into all fields of basic industry.
McDonnell Douglas, RAND and other military enterprises under the Rockefeller consortium have shown their strong military strength. In addition to this, the Rockefeller family also controls the nation's largest civil airline with other conglomerates.
In addition, they have invested heavily in health care, culture and education, and literature and the arts, which have made their influence in these fields very significant.
The influence of the Rockefeller family is well known to the world, and it has achieved many Nobel Prizes in the field of biomedicine, and is known as the United States"Samsung"。
After several generations of unremitting efforts and shrewd management, the Rockefeller family has amassed a huge fortune, according to Forbes magazine, its total assets are as high as $11 billion, and the family is united and harmonious, and there has never been internal strife.
All this is due to the fact that after the death of Rockefeller, the second-generation head John innovatively proposed the asset trust management model.
In the trust model of the Rockefeller family, the principal is automatically passed on to the children of the beneficiary, and the settlor loses ownership and control of the assets after injecting them into the trust.
The beneficiary can only receive dividend income until the age of 30, and can only receive the principal after reaching adulthood. Although there is a certain gap between the wealth of the Rockefeller family and the top richest people in the United States, as an "old money" family that has existed for nearly a hundred years, Rockefeller's influence in both political and business circles is the real wealth.
The list of Rockefeller's executives includes well-known politicians from all walks of life, such as the Bush father and son, as well as well-known figures in the judicial circles, such as retired US officials. The endorsement of these ** influential figures has made the Rockefeller family truly realize its inexhaustible influence.
IV. Conclusion The Rockefeller family, a family that once rewrote American history, became the representative of the first monopoly industry in American history by virtue of its dominance in the oil industry, and made important contributions to the progress and development of society.
However, behind this success is the trampling of countless peers, and the Rockefeller family's business competition methods cannot help but feel regretful. Monopoly made the United States ** at that time a vassal of the chaebol, and even after Roosevelt promulgated the anti-monopoly law, the United States still could not get rid of the shadow of the chaebol.
In this day and age, the United States** has evolved into an arena for various interest groups. The military-industrial complex and Internet companies are engaged in a fierce battle in the Capitol for their own interests.
Through political donations and various means, they try to elect a spokesperson who can represent their interests, thus paving the way for the development of their business.