Standard Oil Company Incorporated in Ohio by John D. Rockefeller

John D. Rockefeller incorporated the Standard Oil Company in Ohio with $1 million in capital, transforming an 1863 partnership into what would become America’s most powerful monopoly. The company was formed with Rockefeller, his brother William, Henry Flagler, Samuel Andrews, and other partners holding shares. This incorporation marked the formal beginning of systematic corporate consolidation strategies that would define the Gilded Age. Within two years, by 1872, Standard Oil would control most Cleveland refineries through the notorious ‘Cleveland Massacre.’ By 1880, Standard Oil controlled 90-95% of all oil refined in the United States through elimination of competitors, railroad rebates, pipeline monopolization, and outright intimidation. The company’s tactics included securing secret railroad shipping rebates, buying up competing refineries at below-market prices after threatening to drive them to bankruptcy, controlling pipeline infrastructure to cut off crude oil supplies to rivals, and bribing state legislators. This represented the birth of modern corporate monopoly power—a template for systematic market capture that Rockefeller would refine through the 1882 Standard Oil Trust. The legal structures and anti-competitive practices pioneered by Standard Oil established patterns of corporate dominance that persist today in Big Tech platforms, though the aggressive enforcement that eventually broke up Standard Oil in 1911 has never been replicated at that scale.