Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
35 published records
01 / uncertainty
“I don't know how they're defining profits here. I don't think this is GAAP accounting.”
02 / belief
“I think that Standard was also making some investments into electricity and electrical utilities.”
03 / evaluation
“Already, that's how big this is and we're still just getting started. This doesn't solve the interstate commerce issue though.”
04 / belief
“In 1862, the first full year of the war, the firm, Clark and Rockefeller, made a trading profit of $17,000 which I believe was 4 times all the money that they had made in all the previous years of operations of the firm.”
05 / belief
“As fun as it is to imagine and theory craft why he was right and how that would have played out, I think net net, we would have consumed about the same amount of oil between then and now.”
06 / belief
“I'm going to throw this out there and say I think the world would end up no different of a place.”
07 / belief
“I'm not feeling strongly any different way. I think that's a really good argument.”
08 / belief
“I think the Chinese political-economic philosophy is really aligned with the Standard Oil view of the world, which is that unfettered competition is fine in the early days of an industry.”
09 / belief
“There's a lot of very good things he does with it that I think we’ll save for part two.”
10 / commitment
“Gasoline helped later. It turns out that compounding can show up especially when the second business line gets layered on top, but we will get into it.”
11 / belief
“I'm not sure if there was any reason why they couldn't. But I think all the folks who were in the producing world—the drilling and the crude world—it was just such a gold rush mentality.”
12 / belief
“You know how we joke about how there must have been ten people in Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s. I think there must've been like 10 people in America at this point in time.”
13 / belief
“I think the perfect place to start is with one of Chernow's quotes at the very beginning in the introduction to Titan where he says, "The story of John D.”
14 / belief
“Yeah, totally. Which partially, I think was just because this was still wild west type stuff.”
15 / belief
“Interestingly, I think the Standard Oil of Indiana company adopted a different logo.”
16 / belief
“I think we're going to leave ourselves enough time to make sure we have this out in the wild before recording the next one.”
17 / belief
“I think the question that we wanted to ask on grading is, Standard Oil becoming a monopoly in this way versus if the industry were to have played out with the unfettered individual competition.”
18 / commitment
“You are to turn over your refinery to my appraisers, and I will give you Standard Oil Company stock or cash, as you prefer, for the value that we put on it.”
19 / belief
“I think pretty early, they figured out you could use sulfuric acid to refine and separate the kerosene out, but a crap ton of sulfuric acid and doing this in large wooden boxes with cracks in it everywhere.”
20 / belief
“Things go okay, but they have some losses. They actually had to bring in a third partner (I think) in 1860 to shore up some losses and bring more capital into the firm.”
21 / belief
“I think he started embracing that later. For a while, his policy was don't talk to the press, then later started opening up to this idea of like, geez, maybe it's probably a good idea for me to have a positive image out there.”
22 / uncertainty
“I don't know for sure, but I didn't see anywhere that the railroads got any equity stake in these pipelines.”
23 / belief
“I think we've talked about this before. Yeah, that telephone lines were laid along rail lines.”
24 / belief
“I haven't rigorously looked at each one, but I think Standard Oil—at various points in its first 20–25 years of existence—exerted every single one of these, but the domineering one, the one that enabled them to do everything that they did was scale economies.”
25 / belief
“I think I'm going to go a notch higher than you to B, just because I really do see both sides here.”
26 / prediction
“They send out a letter to all the groceries in Mississippi. They say, if you do not buy our oil, we will start a grocery store chain to compete with you and sell goods at cost and put you all out of business.”
27 / evaluation
“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.”
28 / preference
“We haven't spent a lot of time on how the value that Standard Oil created compared to the value that they captured for themselves, which I think is the interesting one to look at here.”
29 / evaluation
“I think the way I would look at this one and talk about this is, you can tell from the business practices that we've harped on this entire episode—every time they created value, they looked around to capture every single scrap of it that they possibly could rather than let consumer surplus exist, or their competitors participate in the upside that they were creating or partners.”
30 / evaluation
“I don't think these numbers tell the whole story because so much of the capital in this business was, a) being recycled, and b) not accounted for because of the crazy decentralized trust structure.”
31 / evaluation
“Microsoft basically ended up monopolizing the entire industry because IBM was like, well, wait a minute whether we're putting Windows on these machines or not we're paying for it.”
32 / evaluation
“You have all these people that (I think) in the book refers to someone with a gun, a canteen, and their plot of land in Pennsylvania.”
33 / evaluation
“Because at Standard Oil’s pressure, the railroads have now lowered prices so far in response, it's not economical to use the pipeline.”
34 / prediction
“Because all these soldiers are coming back and getting jobs in factories, you have an industrial boom here.”
35 / preference
“I think that is the right way to frame the amount of money that was flowing through this one company at the time.”