The Rockefellers: History's Richest Man, Standard Oil's Collapse, and the Brothers Who Ran America

In 1870, a former bookkeeper named John D. Rockefeller founded a small Cleveland oil refining company called Standard Oil. Within a decade it controlled roughly ninety percent of American oil refining. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court ordered it broken into pieces in 1911, Rockefeller had built what many economic historians still call the largest private fortune in modern history — and the antitrust breakup, against every expectation, made him even richer. This is the full story of the Rockefeller family: the muckraking journalist whose own family Standard Oil had ruined, the "scientific philanthropy" that built the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ludlow Massacre and the public relations campaign invented to survive it, the construction of Rockefeller Center in the depths of the Great Depression, the five brothers of the third generation nicknamed the "Fab Five" — a bank chairman, two governors, a conservationist, and a Vice President of the United States — and how, over five generations, one of history's most concentrated fortunes was deliberately spread thin enough that today it no longer belongs to any single person at all. Subscribe to The Velvet Ledger for more true stories of old money, and what happens when it runs out. #TheVelvetLedger #Rockefeller #StandardOil #OldMoney #GildedAge