John D. Rockefeller crushed competitors in the oil industry by buying their land to block pipelines, cornering the barrel supply, undercutting prices, and forcing buyouts until rivals folded into Standard Oil.
Chapters
So John, he was in Ohio. Cincinnati was his main spot. That was his hub. He had this vision. He wanted to be the dominant power in oil. There was a new competitor, a threat that came in Pennsylvania that was starting to build refineries. He was starting to send oil to New York. And so what John did, he goes, this person couldn't interfere with my plan to dominate the oil industry. I set out a game plan. I set out a war plan of how I was going to approach and attack this. Step number 1, I offered to just buy their company. I just gave him an offer. He turned it down. I gave him a higher offer. He turned it down. So I said, fine, it's time to go to war. He goes, I bought up a full strip of land across the entire state of Pennsylvania to block this person from building pipelines. I made all these farmers super rich because it didn't work. He had already found a way around it. He had already built his pipeline. I couldn't do it. So then he goes, then I moved to phase 2. So then I called all my friends in the railroad industry and asked them, do not let him build pipelines over or under your railroads and I will pay you to do that. Because I was too late. He had already paid off the other railroad. So he was already now shipping oil into New York and was displacing me out of New York. So he goes, I came back, I took my loss and now this guy was becoming the top oil supplier into New York. Because I had to come back home and I had to regroup on how I would do this game plan. He goes to the manufacturer of oil barrels, like the big storage containers for oil. There's one manufacturer in New York that kind of supplied everybody. He goes, I put in the largest order ever and I said, I'm going to overpay. You have to put me at the front of the line. Really, you can't service anybody else besides me because I'm going to pay you so much. The supplier agreed. So what happened was he bought all these extra containers for oil and this, this competitor couldn't buy them from him. That was phase 1. Phase 2, he goes, I went to the end users in New York and started to buy up the end buyers, their companies, so that they wouldn't buy from him anymore. Finally, I lowered my price of oil so that anybody buying oil, I ran at a loss so that they would buy from me instead of him. He goes, over a course of a few, you know, number of months, we kind of bled this company out. I gave them an offer. We bought their company and now they're part of our Standard Oil empire. Isn't that a wild story?
