He just had that much money

But he also did plenty of good stuff with the money

Like, his son basically built our town

Refined oil prices fell from over 30 cents per gallon in 1869, to 10 cents in 1874, to 8 cents in 1885, and to 5.9 cents in 1897.

But he acquired it through very questionable means

There’s too many myths surrounding standard oil

That’s due to a huge increase in supply

as a monopoly

He wasn’t exploitative of consumers

Just of his competitors

The companies did questionable things

Natural monopolies , when they exist they’re efficient

You can't deny that

How?

he didn’t want to raise prices due to fears of competitor.

Competition

Monopoly = No competition

When a competitor arises, they can crush them

Because they wouldn’t be able to raise prices as competition would come in, wouldn’t be able to give back quality etc

Yes but they would be efficient

They also have a large money supply

Standard Oil was pretty efficient, but that was only because oil had yet to gain traction in the economy and so he had to lower prices to make it a viable fuel

Economies of scale

And he had to lower prices to stop competition

Which helped the consumer

Monopolies barely exist in a free market

He did get into price wars, in which he lowered prices to drive competitors out of business

And a bad monopoly does not exist

yes and he kept prices down

But he would raise prices once they were done

No evidence to support that

As soon as he would, competition would come in

There was an overall lowering trend as crude oil itself got cheaper

Not really

Standard oil did not control the oil extraction business anyways

All the aforementioned tactics basically dissuaded all but the most local competition

yes really

Yes he didn’t raise prices due to him fearing competition

They were more horizontally integrated than vertically integrated, yes

It would have been like that for ever

He often did raise prices