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
The independent refiners of Cleveland had spent that winter hearing a variety of rumors.
Rumors that Standard Oil and the railroads were cooking up some secret pact.
That refiners outside of it would be cut off from crude entirely.
That any resistance to this would mean their ruin.
1871 had already been a terrible year for all the refiners in the city as kerosene prices, already low, dropped another 25%.
And now this hung over them.
Think about what it was like to be one of those refiners.
You've been in the business five or ten years.
Maybe you've made money in the early good years and scraped through the recent bad ones.
But now a quiet young man in a dark suit arrives offering to buy your business.
Rockefeller came to see them all, one by one, and he brought his books with him.
He showed them Standard Oil's finances and exactly why the industry had to consolidate.
We went to one concern at a time, he recalled, and finished with them before we took up the next.
He started with the largest and deepest-pocketed firm in the city.
Rockefeller invited its lending partner, who happened to be an old high school classmate of his, to the parlor of a downtown bank and made his pitch for an oil industry under Standard Oil's control.
The man listened and then wanted to see Standard's books.
Examining the ledgers, he was thunderstruck by the profits.
Let us get the appraisers in, he finally said, and see what the plant is worth.
They negotiated and soon sold out to Standard for $400,000.
Rockefeller felt that he had overpaid but couldn't resist as the deal would make it easier to acquire the others.
Showing 1441–1460 of 20,679 · page 73 of 1034
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