Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yup. What if the trust wasn't broken up? It would have eventually become worse for consumers. The competitors thing is interesting. We've already talked about shareholders. It was great for shareholders that they got broken up. For competitors, it's interesting to me that there was already a very legitimate competitive set emerging by 1906. Certainly by 1911, when they had less than two-thirds market share at that point. I don't think competitors were having a hard time at this point in history because of the maturation of discovery and drilling technology that we realized there was just way more oil out there than we realized. You drill into the Earth's crust under most countries in the world and you're going to find some oil. I think that would have eventually driven down their market share even if the government hadn't broken them up into 34 constituent parts. We were debating like, how do we grade this? What analysis do we do? We've talked a little bit about powers here, but we mostly covered that in the last episode. We're going to end with a grade here in a minute, but we want to add a special section for this episode, which is one of our motivations for doing this series other than it's a really freaking great story and we love telling good stories is like, duh, this is happening again now with tech.…

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