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
On May 1st, 1885, Standard Oil moved into its new headquarters, a nine-story granite fortress at the bottom of Broadway.
The company's name appeared nowhere on the outside, just the street number, 26 Broadway.
Within a few years, that address would be shorthand all over the world for the oil trust itself.
One reporter called the building a cave for pirates, a den for the cutthroats of commerce.
Inside, it was quiet, deliberately so.
Men moved through the halls like clerks in a counting house, not employees of a company that controlled the oil supply of a continent.
People who entered instinctively spoke in hushed tones, and Rockefeller sat in a back office facing the harbor.
The company was run by committees.
Each department had one.
Major decisions went to the executive committee, the nine trustees and their lieutenants, who gathered every day at noon for lunch at a long table on the top floor.
The seating never changed, and Rockefeller deliberately did not sit at the head of the table.
He gave that seat to the group's oldest member and took a place alongside the side among the others.
It fooled no one, and he didn't need to.
He didn't dictate.
He listened.
And then he would ask a few questions, and then wait.
Sometimes he stretched out on a lounge after lunchtime and appeared to doze through the continuing arguments.
He might close his eyes now and then, one executive remembered, but he never missed a point.
Usually the room came around to where he'd been all along, and the decision got made as if it had been everyone's idea.
And what of Henry Flagler?
Showing 1841–1860 of 20,679 · page 93 of 1034
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