Damn Rockefellar Was Rich
 

When he died in 1937 he was the first guy to be worth over a billion dollars.

He had a little over 1.4 billion dollars in 1937 dollars (before the feds devalued the dollar).

That's worth 340 BILLION dollars in todays world!!! Holy shit!

And he gave away 550 Million (in 1937 dollars) of it to charities, unions, churches, education funds, etc.

That would be about half of it!

His personal wealth was 1/65th of the U.S. economy in 1937!

That is almost Mitt Romney comparable.:1orglaugh

The two family's are close :2 cents:

Romney is a pauper comparatively. lol

Compare THE richest man in the world today: Bill Gates.
He is worth 76 billion dollars.

Even he doesn't come close to Rockefeller with 340 billion dollars (in todays money)

New world order family

and the money that Rothschild, Rockefeller and the British Royal Family have makes Gates look skint :2 cents:

By the way why there is no first name in this thread? There were lots of Rockefellers...

damm thats alot of $$$$ :2 cents::2 cents::2 cents:

and when asked how much money is enough? He said, "just a little bit more!" :pimp

$340 billion. Holy fucking shit.

If I had $100 million I could never spend that. WTF could you spend that on - Houses?

Can i get something from that dead rich grandpa? :)

they weren't called robber barons for nothing.

John D. of course. He was the richest...the guy who owned Standard Oil.

The amazing thing is that he gave away more money than the richest guy on Earth in 2014 has ever even had.

yet ... when he golfed he played with used balls over water hazards. He said anyone who played with new balls must be "very rich" ---- being that rich is a mindset not a goal.

yeah i didn't know that. did he give it away after he died or before? is anyone worth that these days?

I think your low on the number, history channel states his wealth to be 660 billion in today's dollars.

He was FUCKING rich :)

read 'Titan' :thumbsup

http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-Joh...dp/1400077303/

Did you watch Men Who Built America recently?

i'd settle for 1% of his daily interest per month

rockefeller was probably the richest american ever...it was absurdly difficult to be a billionaire back then and he is truly the richest person in the last 100 years...

historically speaking, the rothschilds were actually trillionares...its the biggest personal wealth ever accumulated...second only to ramzes the great, this was "empire wealth" and was basically everything worth shit in the known world = ramzes took it...


my favorite character from history is emperor musa of mali :1orglaugh and I quote:

"Musa spent so much gold, particularly in Egypt, that the price of the rare metal was devalued and caused the economy of that nation to be devastated for years."

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I watched that, all of those men got away with murder to build their fortunes! It was insane what they did, zero ethics, kill or be killed mentality.

well nobody is going to match his feat since several of his business practices were criminalized thanks to him.

He is both the triumph of libertarianism, & a cause of its failure.

:2 cents:

laws...country finances..and monopolies

I am in to the 4th episode of 8 and I am yet to see a murder. Even if I missed something it is definitely not "all" of them.
By the way I was expecting more shady deals and violence, I think it may be sugarcoated a lot.

How die he have anything to do with libertarians? The Libertarian Party was founded in 1971.
He died in 1937. lol

He was a straight up capitalist...period. He didn't believe in 1/100th of what Libertarians are for. He was just really, really good at making money.

I doubt very seriously he was pro-gay marriage, anti-war on drugs, pro-choice for abortion, anti-big govt. (hell he was one of the guys who REALLY owned the govt.).

But yeah, many regulations did come into play...but not because of his personal beliefs.

The reality is that he was a pioneer of industry that was breaking new ground. Regulation HAD to be put in place as there was nothing like Standard Oil before.

Electricity had made kerosene lamps pretty much obsolete. He put his people to work on finding something to do with the "waste" product of refining oil. Turned out that "waste product" was gasoline and his fortune went through the stratosphere.

It was all new. Never done before.

They had great successes and they did some things wrong too. Thus the regulations.

There is no way that ANYBODY would have been able to do it any other way. Nobody yet know WHAT to regulate about the oil industry and the new combustion engine, etc.

They figured it out as they went along.

my comment was not really directed at libertarianism as the modern day belief system, but rather the fact that business in the late 19th century was laizze faire, i.e. completely devoid of any government regulation, & therefore the ideal of libertarians for an economic system free from government restraint. The giant fortunes of the gilded age were a triumph of a business climate unfettered by government.

but it was not about regulations catching up to new business practices. The things John D did were criminalized. i really cant do justice about what im saying in a paragraph. The way he ran his business was considered immoral, deceitful, & ultimately made criminal acts. Thats a step beyond just regulations catching up to a new business.

Elaborate on what you're saying. :)

"Criminal acts" is pretty broad. Since those days, the govt. has also made damn near EVERYTHING a "criminal act" lol

We aren't "allowed" by law to get high. Or to give a girl money to have sex. Or to get in our car without wearing a seat belt. Etc., etc.

So just for a good GFY history lesson...go through and pick out every bad thing that Rockefeller ever did.

I was just shocked to find out that he gave away over half of his fortune to charities. He probably did more "good" than 100 million people combined. But I guess that's overlooked today.

I had no idea he had given that much money to help people.

I'm like you and was raised being taught how "evil" he was.

That's the two things that caught me by surprise.
1) How horribly devalued the Federal Govt. has made our money.
2) That Rockefeller gave more money to people than anybody on Earth ever did before or since.

Good thing he gave money for charity.

Damn, John was 97 years old when he died.

Rothschild Dynasty makes the Rockefellars look like lemonade stand money.

Sometimes old wealth mongers get scared as they home in on death. Maybe he was trying to avoid meeting the devil. lol.

sorry but i wont go through a history lesson on why rockefellers business practices were outlawed. those answers are publicly available to anyone who wants to find them.

a lot of life is about perspective. is john rockefeller a good man for being so philanthropic, or is he a bad man for the methods he employed to make it. Much like todays political divide, ones opinion is formed in part by the type of information one is sympathetic to.

i believe in the last line from the movie Lord of War. Evil wins. the strong prey on the weak. murderers become leaders. women get raped. Life is unfair. The rule of law is mans attempt to curb the power of being bad so that there is some semblance of justice, equal protection under the law, equal opportunity for all, etc.

This is why rockefellers business methods were outlawed, so that other people cannot do what he did.

:)

before you make him out to be a hero and a saint, think about how many people died because of standard oil.

..........................

How many people did Standard Oil murder during Rockefeller's time?

I just read his wikipedia entry, he was a religious man, gave 10% of his earnings to the church from the time he was an enterprising boy.

He was ruthless in business believing his company could run the oil industry better than 1000 smaller independent companies and he was correct about that, the result was regular people getting oil products at a reasonable price. He believed industry like life in general was governed by Darwinism, survival of the fittest. As time went on he accepted that this was not a popular opinion and rolled and continued to profit with the punches.

Along with Andrew Carnegie he literally invented modern philanthropy, the greatest contributor to the establishment of medical science, wiped out two killer diseases.
His family were staunch abolitionists on slavery and endowed several African American colleges in the South.

If the wikipedia is more or less a basic biography of the man he was a great man. The good he brought to this world far outweighed his transgressions.

Robbie,

His wealth was worth much more than that. In that era there were no regulations, no forensic accountants, nobody to keep powerful people in check.

There was nothing even REMOTELY libertarian about Rockefeller. NOT EVEN CLOSE. He used the power of government (force) to build every business he had, [through land grants, subsidies, etc...], and used the power of government (force) to keep out all of his potential competitors at the same time, [through regulations, favoritism, etc...].

He was a corporatist. Anyone that thinks he was libertarian does not have the slightest clue what libertarianism is....




...and those same practices that he used through government are being used CONSTANTLY today. They haven't gone anywhere. The government is still totally run by corporatists.

.:2 cents:



.

son of a lifelong conman, what do you expect?

The father was an elixir selling con man, the sons founded Standard Oil (pretty much the entire oil industry).

Not sure how one thing has anything to do with the other? Except maybe the son's (like most kids do), wanted to be the exact opposite of what their dad was?

lol so they took snake oil, and turned it into real oil?

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

:1orglaugh

I was just thinking about how kids rebel...

My family are total redneck bible thumpers. They owned orange groves and cattle pastures down in Florida.

Wanted me to be just like them.

When I was 17 I left home and formed a rock band. Long hair, loud guitar. Toured for the next 15 years. Then I got into the adult industry in the early 1990's.

It's not unusual for kids to go the exact opposite way of their parents.

Not always, but a lot of times they learn from their parents what NOT to do. Sounds like that's what John D. and his brother did. They learned what NOT to do from their shyster dad.

i suppose the apple fell farrrr from the tree :)

Yeah, and my kids are probably gonna end up conservative and religious. :1orglaugh

One of the amazing things here is that ALL of these men lived in the same time period.
It's not like they had an empty canvas to simply dominate all to their own, they were competition to each other. You want to talk about wealth, add up the wealth and innovation of the list below!!!!!!!

Rockefeller
Vanderbilt
Carnegie
Morgan
Ford
Edison

Yeah, it seems that there are just periods of time that produce that kind of thing.

For instance...look at the 1960's for rock music: Beatles, Stones, Doors, Who, Hendrix, Joplin, the list goes on.

Then it seems like we go through decades of...nothing. lol

It's weird how that happens.

Good, within limits greed is indeed good for all, it's the Standard Oils, US Steels and Fords that made America an economic powerhouse 100 years ago and today it's the Googles and Microsofts.

I'm gonna buy that right now and read it next...

That is not correct INHO. Competition and "greed" are functions of a free market. Corporatism stifles competition, innovation, and increases prices to consumers in order to benefit a few friends of the politicians and regulators. If it wasn't for corporatism, a free market would have allowed much faster and more wide-ranging innovation in the name of competition and "greed". America became an economic powerhouse in spite of creeping corporatism, not because of it.


.:2 cents:


.

Show me an industry that has been stifled by corporatism and give examples of this stifling in action. Google came out of nowhere, there was Yahoo, AltaVista and others - Google grew into a behemoth by putting out better products, and now they are so dominant that it is not easy to compete with them. Nobody stifled Google. We do have anti-trust laws to keep some competition going even when the monopolist has not done anything egregiously wrong.

As for less regulation, that sure worked out well in the banking industry.

Bankers and businessmen need to be regulated, they are unable to control their urge to make as much money as possible with no regard for the harm they cause. We want alpha dogs like them, we just need to keep a leash on them and yank hard when they cross the line.