Word: oiled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When he co-founded Standard in 1870, the oil fields of western Pennsylvania--the heart of the new industry--were in a chaotic state as gluts dragged down prices below production costs. Rockefeller then began to employ the tactics that made him a legend. Imposing his own granite discipline on the industry, he bought up rivals, modernized plants and organized the oil industry on an enduring basis...
...first breakthrough came when he landed a job as secretary and telegrapher to Tom Scott, a powerful overlord of the Pennsylvania Railroad. At 23 Carnegie headed Pennsy's Pittsburgh division and began to rake in a small fortune from outside investments ranging from oil to iron bridges. When he was 33, the rich young man privately lectured himself that his continued pursuit of wealth "must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery." Yet he couldn't abandon the money chase. "Put all your eggs into one basket," Carnegie once advised, "and then watch that basket." For him that basket brimmed...
Returning to active management, Bechtel spent six months every year roaming the world, hobnobbing with kings, presidents and foreign business magnates, fishing for projects. Around 1947 he landed a whopper: construction of what was then the world's longest oil pipeline (1,068 miles), across Saudi Arabia. That was an early step in the building of a powerful economy as well as a fruitful relationship with Saudi kings. According to legend, on one trip to the kingdom Bechtel noticed the flames of natural gas being burned off at wellheads as he flew over. Surely, he thought, the wasted energy could...
Trippe bought too many 747s in the early 1970s. A world oil crisis hit airline travel hard, and his business never recovered. Boeing itself almost went belly-up because of the cost of launching...
...price. When Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys cut a side deal with Pepsi to become the official drink of Texas Stadium, thus violating at least the spirit of the lucrative agreement the NFL had cut with Coca-Cola, he was playing the same game as the renegade Libyan oil industry...