Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedBen Gilbert: evaluation
18 Oct 2021 Acquired Standard Oil Part II
“I do think we should think about him like he was a $470 billionaire, not in terms of purchasing capacity, but in terms of societal impact. The analogy doesn't scale all the way back.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ben Gilbert
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 18 Oct 2021
- Publisher
- Acquired
- Episode
- Standard Oil Part II
Transcript context
…The figures I had in my mind and that I think are on Wikipedia are in that sort of $300–$500 billion adjusted net worth range. Yeah. I do think we should think about him like he was a $470 billionaire, not in terms of purchasing capacity, but in terms of societal impact. The analogy doesn't scale all the way back. If you think about when the GDP of America was $1000, if someone had $500 of that, sure, they controlled half the wealth in the nation, but they didn't have the purchasing power that someone who would have $10 trillion today would have. It's an imperfect way of scaling it, but there is no one who controls 2% to 3% of the nation's GDP in their pockets the way that Rockefeller did in 1913. So let's think of him like a $470 billionaire. Here's the thing, he had already given away about half of his wealth at that point.…
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