A Business Empire Broken Apart
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil once monopolized the American oil industry to a fearsome degree — which helped bring about the birth of modern American antitrust law. In 1911 the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had violated the antitrust act and forcibly broke it into more than thirty companies — among them the later Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron. Ironically, after the breakup the combined value of these companies’ shares actually soared, and Rockefeller’s net worth rose rather than fell. This case became the opening of a question argued for more than a century since: how should government rein in monopolistic giants?