The Rockefellers' Billions. The Story of the Largest Fortune in the 19th-20th Centuries

Many contemporaries of John D. Rockefeller believed that his wealth was due to his cunning, ruthless nature, and fanatical stinginess. The well-known economic analyst Jules Abeles has a somewhat different view on this issue. Based on diverse and meticulous research, Abeles investigates the origins of the largest fortune in the world in the 19th-20th centuries and provides an opportunity to understand how one person built an empire and accumulated an outrageous wealth that supports countless charitable and educational endeavors. At the same time, Abeles clearly shows that while Rockefeller balanced on a thin line between business acumen and cunning on one hand and immoral means of conducting economic warfare against competitors on the other, he crossed that line by his own standards and by the standards of society at that time.