> Exxon sells a commodity in a highly competitive market and still one of the top 2 companies by market cap in the world.
Exxon sells a commodity in a market where there are a narrow enough set of nation-state sources that a small cartel of them can substantially impact world pricing by output decisions, where (both inside and outside the cartel) production decisions are substantially governed directly by government policy by nation-states, and where all the firms selling the commodity are either extracting it by way of agreement with the nation states in which it is being extracted or are directly controlled by a nation-state.
When you start hearing about production decisions by the Organization of Data Center Operating Countries, comparing that market to the one Exxon operates in might make sense.
Exxon's value has little to do with the actions of nation states. Rockefeller was relatively speaking wealthier than Bill Gates ($336 billion in 2007 dollars) before nation states got involved in the oil business.
The world's proven oil reserves are ~1.5 Trillion barrels. At 50$/barrel that's 75 Trillion $ before refining. You don't need a large slice of 75 Trillion $ to be ridiculously wealthy.
Large commodity markets require efficiency which might not be sexy, but it can directly translate into profits. Look at the world’s richest people and you see several people from the Walton family because efficiency really can be worth far more than all the social websites combined.
PS: Not to mention 12 out of less than 200 countires are in OPEC and they controwl ~81% of the worlds proven reserves. It's fairly common for a small number of countries to supply the majoirity of a given comodity. EX: 81% of the worlds rice is produces by just 9 countries, and just 6 countries controwl 81% of the worlds coal.
He was worth between $1 and $2 billion in his day, per the best biographies and historical information on the man.
That's a lot closer to $25 to $50 billion today.
The false hundreds of billions number is usually reached one of two ways: 1) by pretending Rockefeller still owned his former share of Standard Oil, represented in the form of the children oil companies today (Exxon et al.); 2) by taking Rockefeller's wealth as a share of GDP, and then claiming based on 2007's GDP he'd be worth X amount.
Note: I used relative wealth for a reason, doing a direct $ to $ conversion misses out of things like the US being on the gold/silver standard well into the 1900's. "Nixon Shock” Often people use things like how much bread cost back then forgetting that bulk food has become ridiculously cheap over time. A better measure is how much it costs to bribe a Politian.
In the end, there are a lot of ways of calculating wealth. However, the ROI was generally much higher in 1800's than today so simply looking at the value people were willing to pay back then is a poor way of calculating wealth. Looking at NPV corrects for most of this based on those calculations you get ~300B.
Also, 1) Ignores dividends so it's actually not nearly as inflated as you might think. And 2) is useful to figure out influence aka things like how much land some historical figure could buy. Or how many people they could employ.