John D. Rockefeller: The Principles Behind The Greatest Fortune in History

**Shane Parrish** (0:05)
Every year on September the 26th, an old man flew a flag. He put on his good clothes, played around a golf, and received visitors at his estate. And if you asked him exactly what he was celebrating, his voice might even crack when he told you. September the 26th wasn't his birthday. It wasn't even his wedding anniversary. September the 26th was a day a merchant in Cleveland, Ohio, back in 1855, looked down at a desperate 16-year-old in a dark suit who had been pounding the pavement for weeks and said to him, we'll give you a chance. From then on, he called it Job Day, and he celebrated it every single year for the rest of his life. That first job paid just 50 cents a day. A few days after he started, the boy walked into a shop and bought a small red notebook for 10 cents. In it, he recorded every penny he earned, every penny he spent, and every penny he gave away.
He called it Ledger A and would keep it in a safety deposit box for the rest of his life, like it was a birth certificate or a deed to something sacred. He would later say that's where it all started, with a 10-cent notebook. Decades later, when he was the richest man on the planet, he still called Cleveland home.
His mother was a Baptist, devout, unyielding, and iron-willed. She ran her household like a fortress to survive her husband's long absences.
She kept her own strict ledger, teaching her five children that every single dollar must be accounted for down to the very last penny. His father was a traveling snake oil salesman who sometimes went under different aliases from town to town, selling fraudulent remedies to desperate people. At home, his philosophy of fatherhood announced loud and proud was, I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make them sharp. That was the home he grew up in. And somehow out of that home came a man who would one day control roughly nine out of every ten barrels of oil refined in the United States. A man who would be vilified as the most hated corporate monster in his country only to become just a few decades later its most generous.
A man whose company the Supreme Court would eventually take nine years to break apart and who would get richer when they finally did. At the peak of his power, his company employed tens of thousands of people. His net worth adjusted for the size of the economy he operated in has likely never been matched before or since.
He sat at a desk at 26 Broadway in Manhattan, and the men who came through his door knew he could end their business with a single word.
Sometimes he did.
This was the same man that got down on his knees every night and prayed. He taught Sunday school at the same church for decades. He tithed from his very first paycheck. When he was making a dollar a day, he was giving away pennies. When he was making more, he gave away more, a lot more. He built universities and medical laboratories with the same intensity that he built an entire industry. In his old age, he walked around with a pocketful of dimes and handed them out to everyone he met. Caddies, porters, waiters, children on the street. Here, a dime from the richest man in the world. Over the course of his life, he gave away something like 30,000 dimes. People today still leave dimes on his grave.
Who was this man? That's what this episode is all about. And I want to warn you, we're not going to answer that question with a simple, tidy narrative because he was not a simple man. He was the young clerk with a 10-cent notebook who through focus and determination became the most powerful private citizen the United States has ever produced. He was a man who loved Cleveland until the city turned on him and yet chose to be buried there anyways. And he was a man whose philanthropy has improved the quality of life of most people on the entire planet. He was born in 1839 He died in 1937
He lived almost a century and now nearly 100 years after his death, the question of who he really was is still very much open.
This is Outliers. I'm your host, Shane Parrish, and this is the story of John D. Rockefeller. You might think you know his story, but you don't.
John D. Rockefeller's family had been moving his entire childhood, drifting from town to town across New York before heading down into Ohio.
It was an unstable existence of shifting addresses. Finally, in the fall of 1853, the 14-year-old boy arrived in downtown Cleveland. His father dropped him off at a boarding house near the Erie Street Baptist Church, opened a small bank account for him, and left him to fend for himself and disappear. Cleveland in the 1850s was a boom town of 25,000 people. Situated on the south side of Lake Erie, it sat at the perfect convergence of water and rail, making it an ideal base for commerce of all kinds.