Given its status as one of the great American business biographies, I decided to read Titan, on Rockefeller, a couple of months ago. (I also paired it with a little of Tarbell’s history.) Titan is an impressive work, clearly the product of prodigious research. Assorted points that jumped out to me: • Certain periods seem more propitious for the rise of noteworthy figures, at least in business: Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller were all born in a four year span. (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also born in the same year.) I wonder how much of this is about the culture vs the business opportunities. More generally, I hadn’t appreciated the fervor (as perceived at the time) of the late 19th century. Thomas Mellon: “It was such a period as seldom occurs, and hardly ever more than once in anyone’s lifetime.” • Chernow: “Many people in the mid-nineteenth century kept such journals to enforce thrift and also objectify their moral performance. Adolescents kept diaries larded with pep talks, exhortations, inspirations, and warnings. Andrew Carnegie wrote hortatory memos to himself, while William C. Whitney kept a small notebook of little homilies. A contradictory impulse was at work: people were spurring themselves to excel but also trying to curb their insatiable appetites in the new competitive economy.” I find myself wondering whether this earnestness is foreign today, or whether it is fully present and has simply taken a different shape, with hustle culture, lifestyle influencers, self-help, and so forth. • Rockefeller sold candy to other kids as a child. I find this specific detail funnily common in the origin stories of magnates. (Warren Buffett, Sheldon Adelson, Thomas Edison, for example.) • Chernow emphasizes the importance of his being given freedom and responsibility from an early age. I’m also struck by how frequently one hears this in similar stories. Bill Gates, for example, mentions in an interview that the freedom he was afforded as an early teenager (sneaking out of the house late at night, etc.) was influential in shaping who he became. (Though he acknowledged that he didn’t parent his own kids that way.) • “One notes that Rockefeller’s earliest memory was associated with caution and that he edited out the absentee father and inebriated grandfather while retaining the strong, enduring mother and grandmother. He always possessed an unusual, self-protective capacity to suppress unpleasant memories and keep alive those things that fortified his resolve.” This reminds me of the point about “suppression” in the Harvard Grant Study (see the 2009 Atlantic article[1]). I often wonder whether suppression (vs “processing emotions”) is underrated. • I don’t understand the whole rebate controversy that was so defining for Standard Oil. It’s extremely common for businesses to receive discounts of some sort in return for significant demand. Is Rockefeller’s name thus unfairly besmirched by this controversy? • In contrast with the “decisive leader” archetype, it’s interesting that the book emphasizes so much his practice of consensus-based decision-making. The obvious question is to what degree that characterization is actually true. Maybe his views tended to be discernible, and he was imbued with sufficient stature and credibility that his perspective carried without comity being disturbed. (On the other hand, the delayed acquisition of the oilfields in Ohio suggests that this at least wasn’t always the case.) • I found the description of Standard Oil as being both a first- and a second-generation company, and Rockefeller as a first- and second-generation manager, to be thought-provoking. (First-generation: being able to innovate in a very messy and open-ended space; second-generation: being able to scale with tight operating discipline.) Rockefeller was in this frame both Steve Jobs v1 and v2. • Chernow describes how Rockefeller was influenced by Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth essay. I went and read it, and found it to be more complex in its views than the straightforward exhortation to philanthropy that I had understood it to be. "In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to use the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all. Neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving." [...] "He is the only true reformer who is as careful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy, and, perhaps, even more so, for in alms-giving more injury is probably done by rewarding vice than by relieving virtue." [...] "The rich man is thus almost restricted to following the examples of Peter Cooper, Enoch Pratt of Baltimore, Mr. Pratt of Brooklyn, Senator Stanford, and others, who know that the best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise—parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the public taste, and public institutions of various kinds, which will improve the general condition of the people; in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good." It is interesting that the adverse effects of charity were so prominent for Carnegie. For him, artworks that “improve the public taste” are to be prioritized over mere “alms” (which may cause injury). Rockefeller appears to have agreed: “It is a great problem to learn how to give without weakening the moral backbone of the beneficiary.” On this topic, Frederick T Gates’s philanthropy tips, mentioned in passing and which I managed to track down, now make for entertaining reading[2]. • The idea that the air quality in some of the environs of the refineries was so poor that it ruined beer and milk was arresting. As far as I can tell, the noxious quality of urban air is one of the first things that would strike us if we traveled back in time. • Chernow describes how Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue was “the most beautiful in the world”. Sadly, it seems to have been fully demolished. I’d love to understand why: any individual might err in tearing down a beautiful home, but for all of them to be razed requires a structural change. Were staff too expensive in the face of the city's economic decline? Did property taxes rise to unsustainable levels? Is this simply a story of changing tastes? Of course, there are many Euclid Avenues across the US. • Miscellaneous small facts that stood out: both the panics of 1873 and 1893 were at the time called “great depressions”. There were 17 attorneys in the Department of Justice at the time of Teddy Roosevelt. James Joyce was supported by Edith Rockefeller. John D. Rockefeller Jr. didn’t like modern art, but Abby Rockefeller helped start MoMA. I hadn’t known that the first prognostications of Peak Oil had occurred so early! “In 1875, Henry E. Wrigley, the head of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, issued a doomsday warning that the state—and hence the world—production of oil had peaked.” • My main reflection, and I suppose critique of the book, is that there’s so little about the business of Standard Oil. Extensive time is spent on the acquisitions of competitors that Rockefeller engaged in, but there’s no explanation of how he could afford them. Why was Standard Oil able to do this vs having other competitors buy him out? How did Rockefeller manage dilution through this period? Did he purchase at cyclical lows? The book claims that he tended to buy at fair prices, but was there in fact sub rosa coercion? How much did capital costs and tariffs matter in determining the international market structure? The LLMs haven’t helped me much on these kinds of questions. In general, business biographies have far too little structural analysis for my taste. In an ideal world, I’d really like some combination of the human biography and HBS case studies/Goldman Sachs analyses: stories about the subject’s relationship with their parents, sure, but also figures, tables, and charts. Perhaps this is challenging in practice given the disparate skills required to produce such a thing, though maybe the LLMs of the future will be able to produce them on demand. (Is this an eval?) Which are the books that come closest to doing this today?