John D. Rockefeller

John D. Rockefeller was an American industrialist who founded Standard Oil in 1870 and built it into the dominant force in the American petroleum industry during the late nineteenth century. Standard Oil controlled the refining, transport and marketing of oil across the United States, driving down consumer prices for kerosene even as it eliminated smaller competitors through aggressive rebates and horizontal integration. Rockefeller became the worlds richest man and a symbol of the industrial ages concentration of economic power, until the United States Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil broken into more than thirty companies in 1911 for violating antitrust law. In his later decades he became one of historys largest philanthropists, and his career established the vertically integrated oil corporation as the template the twentieth century petroleum industry would follow.