David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…These are Standard Oil board meetings. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But he's actually listening intently to everything. He's always been a little weird in how he operates, but super laser-focused and engaged in the business. He kind of starts drifting away slowly and he seems weird. He starts not coming into the office every day. I think first he stops coming in on Saturdays and then he takes a longer time off. He starts missing the sacred executive committee or gentleman upstairs lunch meetings. There really are two things happening to Rockefeller at this time. One is sort of like short-term good but long-term bad, and the other one is short-term bad but long term good. He doesn't have anything left to prove at this point. He's outwitted everybody. Of course, we talked about the Jay-Z-Rockefeller connection last time, but it's like the black album with Jay-Z where he's like, I'm retiring. I'm done. Literally what more can I say here? Chernow writes, "In explaining his retirement," which this would lead to, "the Rockefeller literature has always stressed his health and the heavy burden of his charities, though another factor contributed as well: He had perfected the gleaming machinery of Standard Oil and his appointed task done," remember, he felt like this was his divine duty from God, "he felt he should pass the reins on to younger men." As Gates, who will talk about in a minute, put it "the business coat had ceased to amuse him. It lacked the freshness and variety and had become merely irksome and he withdrew." What you're saying is, Rockefeller is really only like a 0 to 1 guy, and maybe like a 1 to 10 guy and kind of like a 10 to 100 guy, but maybe not 100 to 1000 guy. Or perhaps he's already at scale. He's not really 1000 to 1100 guy.…

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