John D. Rockefeller was the founder of Standard Oil, the forerunner of nearly every United States-based oil company in existence today, and a philanthropist who founded the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Rockefeller was born into a modest family that moved between western New York and Ohio while he was a child. He began investing in oil refineries in Cleveland, Ohio in 1862, and formed Standard Oil of Ohio in 1870. By 1874, Standard Oil had bought out all of the other refineries in Cleveland. By the 1890s, Rockefeller was a multi-millionaire and Standard Oil owned 90% of the market for kerosene products. In [[1911], the Supreme Court ordered that Standard Oil be broken up as it had become a monopoly, and the company was divided into 34 separate companies, including what would become Amoco, Conoco, Chevron, Exxon, and Mobil. In 1902, Rockefeller had a net worth of $200 million and upon his death in 1937, his fortune was estimated at $1.4 billion. Relative to the purchasing power of money at the time, Rockefeller's fortune was vastly more than that held by Bill Gates or other billionaires today.