David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…That was the reason why they needed the trust structure in the first place is because Standard Oil of Ohio couldn't own any other Standard Oil companies that are operating in any other states. They couldn't have operations in other states. It's just this crazy remnant of the fact that we are the United States and every single state to date has basically said, if you have the charter to operate a corporation in our state, that's all the business you can do. Your total addressable market is our state. They've got this loophole in New Jersey. What did they do? Boom, they just reorganized the whole thing and they transferred all the assets into the new Standard Oil of New Jersey, or again, at least they made a public show of this. They tell the courts, they tell everybody like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this is what we're doing. Whether they actually do this or not? We’ll maybe see a little later in the episode. It doesn't matter though, problem solved. As Chernow writes in Titan, "The 1892 overhaul was mostly shadow play, a charade to appease the courts. The executive committee at 26 Broadway," of course Rockefeller, Flagler, and all the cronies, "was formally dissolved, but the members lost only their titles and were soon converted, by the nicest legal cunning, into the presidents of 20 affiliated companies. In Standard parlance, these men were now the "gentleman upstairs" or alternatively the "gentleman in Room 1400." Nobody had to switch seats at the lunch table, and Rockefeller and his coterie ruled as absolutely as before." Fascinating. You've got this Standard Oil of New Jersey that, by the letter of the law, owns wholly or nearly all these other, at this point, 20 some companies that are operating in all these other states. The way that that sort of structurally looked is all the people who were the trustees of the Standard Oil trust are now the presidents of all those companies, and they're working remotely from Manhattan.…

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