David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I want to end with just illustrating Standard's wealth here, more in particular Rockefeller's wealth. Because we've talked about a few figures over time, one of them was the 1902 audit that showed he was worth about $200 million, then around 1911 around $300 million. He actually, with all the stock pops in the split up and the move into the gasoline market for internal combustion engines, his personal wealth by 1913, just two years after the breakup, was $900 million. In 2021 inflation-adjusted dollars, if you literally just do the inflation math, that's about $25 billion. But the more accurate way to look at it would be to say, actually, that's like 3% of GDP, which was still only $40 billion relative, of course, to $21 trillion today. So if you base it on GDP, that figure is about $470 billion. 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.…

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