William Rockefeller Sr.

And the origin story is wild.

His father was this charming con man who sold patent medicine and pretended to be a doctor.

The guy would disappear for months at a time and leave the family broke.

Right, and he was a bigamist too.

She raised him on thrift, hard work, and moral responsibility.

So Chernow's whole argument is that Rockefeller is the product of that union.

He takes his father's shrewdness and his mother's discipline and fuses them into this one unstoppable force.

Exactly.

All three guys have these like boring kind of just basic jobs, but very important jobs of like working with the telegraph or Vanderbilt getting his own boat and driving people up and down the river.

It's this getting on the ground floor and understanding how not just how the type of business they're working in, but this new industrial era of business is going to change because it's not something, and we'll get into this in a bit, but it's not something he's going to learn from his father.

And it's definitely not something he's going to be learning from other people just because it is so new.

But again, another person in this story that is just working their way up from maybe not nothing, but from a smaller amount of wealth or even prestige to to a point where super wealthy and it's yes this is definitely not the story of well they got a loan from their parents or they had a big amount of money or an inheritance that they could take and maybe they built on it but it's it is really building something from the ground up

I love the titles of old books.

I was published in 1909 and it's kind of this retrospective, uh, of him looking back, but he continually returns to the prudence and experience that he gained in this early career that taught him about the importance of avoiding unnecessary waste.

So in 1859, at 20 years old, he uses roughly $1,000 of savings and another $1,000 borrowed from his father to establish a common partnership with Maurice B. Clark.

The timing is pretty remarkable, and again, we say it over and over again, there is no substitute for good timing.