David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Also, this selling shares to raise equity capital thing, Rockefeller is like, my God, that is brilliant. How did I not think of this before? Totally. It's Flagler that comes up with this, it's amazing. On January 10th, 1870, they abolished the old partnership and they poured all of its assets into the new joint-stock company, the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, boom, it's born. They capitalize this new joint-stock corporation with $1 million of liquid assets. That is how enormous this had become already, unheard of. I don't think that there was any other organized enterprise in America with that amount of capital. Already, that's how big this is and we're still just getting started. This doesn't solve the interstate commerce issue though. They come up with another absolutely brilliant and diabolical plan to solve this, which is the trust. What they decide to do is they say, okay, technically, companies can't own shares in other companies outside the state. But what if we create a trust then this trust holds shares in companies all around the country? The trust could have some trustees that get to decide what happens with maybe all the companies that roll up to the trust. We can make sure that these corporations, each of which are nicely situated inside their own state and don't own any property outside their own state. But we, the trustees, sort of get to decide how those companies might work together.…

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