his process for making steel, used by Carnegie made Carnegie the richest individual on the planet. With a tiny fraction of that money Carnegie built some of our first public libraries across the USA after he retired.

Thank you Bessemer! Where would we go during recessions to hang out w/o him?

On oil, you know, the fix is in to lock it in the $50 to $80 a bbl range. When people objected to $50 a bbl oil went up to close to $150 a bbl to punish us. Now when it drops back to $65 a bbl we will be gushing our thanks to the monstrous commodity suppliers of OPEC.

But not as rich as John D. Rockefeller, who at one time controlled nearly 5% of the wealth of America.

That oil stuff, again.

I suppose it might be that there was a year or two in there when Carnegie was richer than Rockefeller, but am actually a bit skeptical about that....

They both were responsible for lots of positive changes.

Retirement and Philanthropy

From the mid-1890s until his death in 1937, Rockefeller’s activities were philanthropic. Rockefeller’s fortune peaked in 1912 at almost $900,000,000, but by that time he had already given away hundreds of millions of dollars. His son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., in 1897 joined Gates in the full time management of the fortune.

The University of Chicago -- which Rockefeller was largely responsible for creating -- alone received $75,000,000 by 1932.

He set up, at the urging of his son, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) and his gifts to it totaled $50,000,000 by the 1930s.

He founded the General Education Board in 1903 (later the Rockefeller Foundation). The General Education Board helped to establish high schools throughout the South by providing free professional advice on improving instruction and education. The effort was a cooperative one, and local money was used to build the high schools. In 1919 Rockefeller donated $50,000,000 to the Board to raise academic salaries, which were very low in the wake of WWI.

The Rockefeller Foundation was officially established in 1913 and Rockefeller transferred $235,000,000 to it by 1929.

In 1909 Rockefeller established the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission which was largely responsible for eradicating hookworm in the South by 1927.

When Rockefeller died, on May 23, 1937, his estate totaled only $26,410,837. He had given most of his property to his philanthropies and to his son and other heirs.

Rockefeller was a Schumpeteran entrepreneur. He clearly changed "the stream of the allocation of resources over time by introducing new departures into the flow of economic life" by creating the modern oil industry. His emphasis on size and efficiency and the use of modern chemistry resulted in the development of a wide variety of new products that made the lives of ordinary people better as a consequence. He made light cheap for untold millions and his great creation was ready, willing, and able to provide the cheap gasoline when it was needed, thus ushering in the age of the automobile in America.

Last, but not least, he set the standard for philanthropy. Just the eradication of hookworm in the South alone would merit his place as one of the great humanitarians of the 20th Century. But his reputation was so sullied that he never received the credit that he was due for this great act on behalf of humankind.

[This biography of John D. Rockefeller Sr. was written by Keith Poole, Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston, as part of a course on Entrepreneurs and American Economic Growth.]

of course, today we have hedge fund managers who get yearly bonuses of 1.4 Billion dollars, 900,000,000 pfft!