The Only Man Richer Than Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk

The Story of John D Rockefeller - the richest self made man ever? The ultimate rags to riches tail of one of history's wealthiest businessmen, oil magnate, John D. Rockefeller. When adjusting for inflation, some estimate his net worth would have today been around 400 billion dollars, making him the richest person in the world. But how did he build his business empire & make so much money? This video is Rockefeller's story...

John D. Rockefeller, the oil magnate that’s widely considered the richest American of all time, with an approximate net worth of around 400 billion dollars in today’s money, even after giving a substantial amount of his fortune away.

And yet, he started from very humble beginnings. When he turned 16 Rockefeller dropped out of school and got his first real job as a book-keeper, earning just 50 cents a day. However, after working there for around 2 years, his employers still refused to give him a meaningful raise, and so he decided to start his own produce business, as he had a goal to make $100,000, and knew he’d need to build something of his own to reach that target.

Luckily, that first job had already taught him a lot, and gave him the experience, connections and reputation, to raise $4,000 for starting his own venture; a business selling goods like meat, hay and grain. Which did well, in the first year of trading it made almost half a million dollars - of course Rockefeller didn’t keep all of that, a lot of it went back into business expenses and loans, but it meant when a big opportunity arose, he now had some real money to invest.

And that opportunity, was oil. In 1859, the first American oil well was discovered, which began the Pennsylvania oil rush. However, Rockefeller realised that whilst most people were trying to get rich from drilling oil, the bigger profits were actually in oil refinery. So, at just 24 years old, he used the money from his first business to build an oil refinery.

Now, around this time he met a man named Henry Flagler who was interested in investing in his business, and so together they incorporated the Standard Oil Company, and began the process of buying out all the smaller nearby oil refineries that were in competition with them. Whenever any of these refineries refused to sell their oil to him, he simply started selling his oil at a loss so that their customers flocked to him instead, which would put these smaller companies out of business.

These kind of practices allowed the Standard Oil company to keep expanding across the entire country - they kept buying out rivals, undercutting competitors, and cutting costs wherever possible. By the 1870’s, Rockefeller's oil company owned 90% of the world's oil refining industry. He owned 20,000 oil wells, had over 100,000 employees, and at the vert peak, some estimate its total value would today have been worth almost a trillion dollars. But Rockefeller wasn't done yet.

Video produced by MagnatesMedia (John Frazer). I may receive a commission on affiliate links used.

Seldom has history produced such a contradictory figure - but what do you think of John D Rockefeller? Comment below! And let me know if you want more business stories about classic business magnates.