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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
The shareholders of Standard Oil of Ohio and roughly 40 other companies handed over their stock to nine men who became known as trustees.
Rockefeller was chief among them.
In exchange, each shareholder received trust certificates, pieces of paper entitling them to their slice of the profits of everything, the whole combined machine.
The nine trustees now controlled all the companies, appointed every board, and could run them all as if they were one company, across every state line in the country.
Technically, the trust itself didn't exist anywhere.
It couldn't sign contracts.
It kept no public books.
And most importantly, there was no law it violated because nothing like it had ever been done before.
A now $70 million enterprise controlling nine out of every 10 barrels of oil, and the public still knew nothing about the arrangement.
Rockefeller held on to more than a third of it all, a block of shares worth about $19 million.
He was 42 at the time.
The trust did something else Rockefeller cared a great deal about.
For the first time, Standard Oil existed as a paper a person could own, and he urged every person he knew to buy it, especially Standard Oil employees.
He even made his own money available to help them do it.
I would have every man a capitalist, every man woman and child, he said.
I would have everyone save his earnings, not squander it, own the industries, own the railroads, own the telegraph lines.
it worked better than any loyalty oath could have.
The men and families of Standard Oil were now proper shareholders watching their certificates climb in value.
As a result, many of them closed ranks around the company like a faithful around a church.
And because of it all, the word trust entered the American vocabulary because of Standard Oil.
Showing 1801–1820 of 20,679 · page 91 of 1034
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