There's “rich” … and then there’s John D. Rockefeller. Co-founder of the Standard Oil Company in 1870 AD, by the mid-1880s he controlled some 90 percent of all refineries and pipelines in the United States. In 1911 the Supreme Court found Standard Oil in violation of anti-trust laws and ordered it dissolved, but that didn’t slow John D. much. Based on 1918 federal income tax records, Rockefeller earned about 1.5 billion dollars that year, roughly 2% of the country’s total wealth. At his death, he was estimated to be worth the equivalent of $341 billion.

Born in July 1839 in Richford, he was the eldest son of William Rockefeller, either a travelling salesman or a con artist. Industrious to a fault, John earned money raising turkeys, selling potatoes and candy, doing odd jobs, and even loaning neighbors small sums with low interest. And he learned to be shrewd; his father once bragged, “I cheat my boys every chance I get.” In 1853, John took a business course at Folsom’s Commercial College, and became an assistant bookkeeper.

In 1859, Rockefeller and Maurice Clark together raised four thousand dollars and opened their own firm, dealing in wholesale food. In 1863 John D. and his partners entered the oil business. They built an oil refinery in Cleveland’s industrial area “The Flats." John, in control of the company, found inventive ways to reinvest profits, control costs and even sell the refineries’ waste by-products. In 1870, Rockefeller bought out his partners and incorporated the Standard Oil Company; thanks to favorable economic conditions and Rockefeller’s own “business acumen” (a polite term for ruthless practices) it soon dominated the market. After Standard Oil was broken up, he spent his last years being a philanthropist and died in 1937.