Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, what a story. As we get into the analysis here, I have a few fun points I want to make. We used to do these narrative sections when we did IPOs. I want to talk about the public sentiment versus Rockefeller’s defense. The public sentiment here, and when we say public, it's less at this point in history the actual public and more about their competitors who are making a bigger deal out of this because all the public knows is there’s this really big company. They provide things (kerosene mostly) that I use in my life, and it gets to me in a consistent way and at a stable price. It is good for consumers. If you think about the consumer welfare standard of antitrust, this really isn't bad for consumers. It could get there if Standard Oil is the only company and they sort of wield that power to raise prices and stuff like that. But at this point, it's really their competitors who hate their guts, and especially anybody who's been coerced to cooperate with them—the railroads, the pipelines, anyone in their orbit, the retailers, it sucks for them too. You've got these beginnings of really stirred up public sentiment against this company that is by some views, the most evil capitalist structure of all time. Americans, ever since we got here from England—my family immigrated at some point so I certainly didn't come from England. But ever since the original Anglo people came over from Europe and settled in America, there's been this incredible hatred of monopolies. In particular, because our country was founded on equality and people having the right to be free, the free market. The government was a monopoly in England and that's what we were running from. Still, to this day, there's a huge skepticism amongst Americans of centralized government power.…

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