Daniel Yergin

Yeah, exactly.

Because they're not centralized, there was more room for entrepreneurship, for experimentation, for research, for people to solve problems that other people said, oh, you can't solve them.

You know, I think he respected his competitors, particularly the hardy ones.

And those were the ones who were players who said, okay, rather than fight you, I'm going to get on board this ship as well.

And so he brought them in and...

You know, they all prospered as a result of that.

You know, they gave up.

They said, we're not going to fight you.

We're going to join you.

He became the very epitome of the monopolist.

There's a famous woman journalist, one of the great women journalists named Ida Tarbell wrote this book about him, about the Standard Oil Trust.

She said it was a great company, but it always played with loaded dice.

So he was a very embodiment.

You had this trust busting president, Theodore Roosevelt, and this was the most obvious trust.

And I think also because like today with gasoline, it's the one thing everybody buys.

You and I don't go out and buy steel, but you go to a gasoline, unless you have an electric car, you go to a gasoline station to fill it up.

And I think that was the same thing.

This was the omnipresent product.

But Rockefeller, his idea was to get scale and drive down the price, in a sense, expand the market.

But it was a monopoly and we have an antitrust law.