Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Before the day was over, he had had a heart attack, and soon after he slipped into a coma and died in his sleep, just six weeks short of his 98th birthday.
His body went by private rail car to Cleveland and was lowered into the ground between the two Baptist women who had believed in him without reservation his whole life, his mother Eliza and his wife Setti.
So what to make of this man?
Let's start with the math, since he would have.
By the time he and his son were done, his fortune had been very largely given away.
He donated more than half a billion dollars in his own lifetime.
Juniors spending the inheritance moved more than a billion more.
They funded a university, a medical institute that would help give the world vaccines, the campaigns that broke hookworm and yellow fever, schools of public health on three continents.
A great deal of human suffering ended because he had decided that hoarding money was a sin and had built a machine to get rid of it.
And the machine that made money in the first place had run on rebates and spies and burned ledgers and the quiet ruin of men who had trusted his cash over stock.
Both of those things are true at the same time.
Tarbell got that one directionally right, and his own papers opened long after everyone involved was dead showed it ran deeper than she had ever proved.
He went to his grave certain that critics were sore losers and that God was keeping the only books that mattered.
And yet history, in the end, has been kinder to the company than Tarbell was.
Standard Oil rose out of an industry that was pure chaos, a frenzy of booms and busts and reckless overbuilding that ruined nearly everyone who touched it, and Rockefeller forced order onto it.
He drove the price of kerosene down so far and so steadily that ordinary families could afford to light their homes for the first time.
He brought science into the trade, a test laboratory in every refinery, and built the pipelines and tank cars and worldwide distribution that became the template for the modern corporation.
Even the breakup made the point in its own backhanded way.
The pieces turned out to be worth so much more apart than together that his own grandson, writing an economics thesis years later, sided with the court while still crediting Standard Oil for bringing order to the industry.
He had kept his own books from the start.
Showing 2441–2460 of 20,679 · page 123 of 1034
← Previous
Next →