How Standard Oil Was Broken Up and Won Anyway
The 1911 breakup of Standard Oil didn't hurt John Rockefeller. It made him the richest man in American history.
On May 15, 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, finding it had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The court ordered the parent company split into 34 smaller, independent firms. It was the largest antitrust action in American history to that point.
John D. Rockefeller, who had retired from active management in 1897, owned a proportional share in every successor entity. He still held roughly 25 percent of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and received equivalent stakes in each spinoff. When the breakup was announced, investors who had been uncertain about the conglomerate's opaque structure suddenly had 34 transparent, separately traded companies. Their combined market value was substantially higher than the parent. By 1913, Rockefeller's net worth had roughly tripled. His fortune at its peak is estimated at $900 million in 1913 dollars — the equivalent of perhaps $400 billion today.
The successor companies took decades to recombine. Standard Oil of New Jersey eventually became Exxon, then ExxonMobil after a 1999 merger with Standard Oil of New York (Mobil). Standard Oil of California became Chevron. Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco, which BP acquired in 1998. The breakup restructured the industry without redistributing its wealth — a pattern antitrust enforcement has repeated, with varying effectiveness, ever since.
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