20 Oil Fortunes That Secretly Reshaped American History

John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil, the dominant U.S. oil refining company. In response to public outcry, the Supreme Court ordered it broken up in 1911 into dozens of smaller pieces, which became the progenitors of firms like Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron. But far from ruining him, the breakup sent the newly independent companies’ stock prices skyrocketing, and Rockefeller quickly became the first American confirmed to be a billionaire. He subsequently donated more than $500 million, including funds that helped found the University of Chicago.

In 1909, Howard Hughes Sr., a Texas businessman, received a patent for a rotating, two-cone drill bit, which he developed with a partner. Previous drillers had used flat bits, which became blunt when they hit hard rock. The cone bit chewed right through it. This opened up vast oil reserves all over the world. Hughes did not sell the bits. Instead, he leased them, ensuring revenue kept coming in long after the initial sale. When Hughes Sr. died in 1924, his 18-year-old son inherited the wealth, not the intellectual property, and spent it on planes and movies.

J. Paul Getty bought cheap oil stocks in the 1930s and made his fortune on them. He then invested $9.5 million in the rights to drill in a desert zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where no oil had ever been found. After years of searching, his crew found oil at Wafra, a field containing billions of barrels. A few years later, Fortune magazine named Getty the richest American alive. Getty went on to found the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, using his oil money.

Edward Doheny struck oil in Los Angeles with a sharpened eucalyptus log and created the Southern California oil boom. When Doheny sought leases on a government oil reserve years later, he sent his son to give Interior Secretary Albert Fall, a cabinet member, a black bag with $100,000 in cash. A Senate probe uncovered the payoff, which became the center of the Teapot Dome scandal, and Fall was convicted of accepting the bribe. Doheny was acquitted of giving it, in a separate trial.

Harry Sinclair established Sinclair Oil, with its iconic green dinosaur mascot, and later bribed Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall with more than $300,000 in cash and bonds for the lease to drill at Teapot Dome, a federal oil reserve in Wyoming. For that, the Supreme Court overturned the lease. During his trial, Sinclair’s detectives trailed the jurors, and he was sent to prison for contempt of the Senate and jury tampering. After serving his sentence, he went back to Sinclair Oil.

Columbus Marion “Dad” Joiner was a 70-year-old wildcat driller almost out of money in Rusk County, Texas, when his well hit the East Texas Oil Field. He’d oversold shares of the lease to raise the money to drill the well. The subsequent lawsuits forced him to sell the acreage to oilman H.L. Hunt for $1.33 million. The resulting glut of oil sent prices tumbling, and the state began to limit how much companies could pump.

H.L. Hunt was a former pro gambler who didn’t actually find the East Texas Oil Field himself. Hunt recognized the field’s potential and bought Dad Joiner’s 4,000-acre property in 1930 for $1.33 million, striking gold at the heart of the field. His oil business grew into one of the biggest private oil companies in North America. Hunt lived modestly, and he later used his wealth to create a conservative radio and television network that shaped political discourse in America for years.

In 1853, a New York lawyer named George Bissell noticed the dark stuff bubbling up near Titusville, Pennsylvania. It could probably be turned into lamp fuel, which was cheaper than whale oil. Bissell organized a company, and a Yale chemist tested the oil and said it would work as fuel. So Bissell hired a retired railroad conductor, Edwin Drake, to drill for it. Drake hit oil in 1859, and the first oil boom began. Bissell made a fortune on the resulting land and transportation deals. Drake never patented his process and died impoverished.

Henry Flagler formed Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller in 1870 and worked out deals to receive railroad rebates that were instrumental in making the company a giant. He left Standard Oil for real estate in Florida in the 1880s and invested heavily in luxury hotels and in railroads reaching as far as Miami and then Key West. With land and support from other Florida landowners who joined him in the Miami rail project, Flagler spent enough money to construct the rail line down the coast and many resorts there. The rail line and resorts remain key parts of the state’s tourism industry today.

In 1901, Pittsburgh bankers Andrew and Richard Mellon funded the Spindletop gusher near Beaumont, Texas, by providing the money for the engineer and promoter who drilled it. By 1907, the brothers were running the company themselves, reorganizing it as Gulf Oil Corporation, which would be a pioneer in offshore oil drilling and the first to offer the drive-in gas station. Andrew Mellon served as Secretary of the Treasury. Eventually, their banking and oil wealth helped fund the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

People nicknamed Thomas “Tom” Slick Sr. “Dry Hole Slick” for the number of bad wells he drilled. But in March of 1912, one of his wells hit oil near Cushing, Oklahoma. Within a few years, the Cushing field pumped more than 300,000 barrels per day, accounting for about 17% of U.S. production at the time. Slick liquidated his Cushing assets and used the proceeds to finance additional projects. The site of his discovery is now the benchmark location for U.S. crude-futures contracts.

Erle Halliburton was fired from an oil-cementing company in 1919 when he proposed changes without approval. He went on to form his own company and patented a method in 1921 for pumping cement down the steel casing of a well to plug off water and keep the hole from caving in. It reduced well blowouts and leaks around the world. Halliburton’s firm carried out its first offshore cementing job in the Gulf of Mexico in 1938 and became one of the largest oilfield service companies.

In 1907, a California oilman named Reuben Carl Baker got a patent for a casing shoe, a hollow wooden ring he attached to the bottom of a well’s steel casing. The casing shoe allowed drillers to lower the casing past a stretch of crumbly rock without losing the cement bond holding the well together. This saved wells that might otherwise collapse. Baker spun off a firm that specialized in the invention and continued patenting improvements on the casing shoe, as well as other “down-hole tools,” for decades. That firm ultimately became part of Baker Hughes.

In 1910, while still an undergraduate student, Everette DeGolyer discovered a big Mexican oil gusher using almost no information but his educated guesses about what he could see on the surface. Not satisfied with such methods, he developed the use of gravity measurements and seismic soundings, which could identify salt domes and other underground structures where oil might be trapped even before a hole was drilled in the ground. He established various exploration and consulting firms based on these techniques. He also helped revive a literary magazine and endowed a history library at Southern Methodist University.

Frank and L.E. Phillips incorporated Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, after striking oil on Osage Nation land. Phillips created the high-octane aviation fuel that powered America’s warplanes in WWII. Its first gas station was called “Phillips 66,” named for U.S. Route 66 and a speed of 66 miles per hour reached during a test drive. Later, Frank Phillips built a wildlife preserve and museum on his Oklahoma ranch.

When Joseph “Buckskin Joe” Cullinan, a Standard Oil company manager, witnessed the 1901 Spindletop gusher, he saw the need for crude oil storage, pipelines, and refinement. In 1902, he and a New York investor founded The Texas Company, which would eventually become Texaco, and Cullinan decided to base the company’s headquarters in Houston. This was a major factor in Houston’s growth as an international center of the petroleum industry. In 1928, Texaco became the first oil company to sell gasoline in all 48 states.

William Rockefeller Jr., the younger brother of John D. Rockefeller, directed Standard Oil’s Wall Street financing from New York City. In the 1890s, working with a banker partner, he channeled Standard Oil’s cash into the National City Bank of New York, making it the largest commercial bank in the country. The bank’s deposits financed massive industrial consolidations and railroad systems. When Rockefeller died in 1922, the bank he had built up survived, eventually forming the basis for what is now Citigroup.

A leading Standard Oil man named Henry Rogers once used his own $40 million fortune to finance a lengthy railroad without help from Wall Street bankers. The railroad carried coal from West Virginia down to the seaboard. He also made an unpublicized deal with Booker T. Washington, the famous educator, to finance 47 to 65 country schools for Black children throughout the segregated South. Rogers wanted everything kept secret, and Washington only spilled the beans on who had paid for it all after Rogers died.

Samuel Jones patented an improved metal part for oil pump jacks and established a company in Toledo, Ohio, which dominated the market for pumping equipment. At his factory, where 10- or 12-hour workdays were standard elsewhere, he instituted an eight-hour workday and paid vacations and annual bonuses. He eventually became the reform mayor of Toledo, challenging its utility monopolies.

Lyman Stewart co-founded the Union Oil Company of California, which evolved into the West’s largest independent oil company. From 1910 to 1915, he and his brother, fearing that the tide was turning in favor of liberal theology, anonymously spent $300,000 to print 3 million copies of a 12-volume essay series on traditional Christian beliefs. They sent them, free, to pastors all over the world. This series, called The Fundamentals, provided the name for the 20th century’s “fundamentalist” movement. Lyman Stewart also invested the dividends from Union Oil in establishing a school that would become Biola University.

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