Posing as a deaf-mute peddler selling cheap novelties, he kept a small slate with the words “I am deaf and dumb” chalked across it tied by a string to his buttonhole. On this slate, he conversed with the locals and later boasted how he exploited this ruse to flush out all the town secrets. To win the confidence of strangers and soften them up for the hard sell, he toted along a kaleidoscope, inviting people to peer into it.

Perhaps out of a self-protective instinct, Bill taught his children to be wary of strangers and even of himself. When John was a child, Bill would urge him to leap from his high chair into his waiting arms. One day, he dropped his arms, letting his astonished son crash to the floor. “Remember,” Bill lectured him, “never trust anyone completely, not even me.”

Rockefeller was always insistent that Standard’s competitive advantage had nothing to do with preferential transport rates, but his correspondence reveals that rebates could single-handedly transform an unprofitable plant into a profitable one. ... In the 1870s, Rockefeller began to assemble a marketing organization to eliminate the middlemen, independent agents who had earned three to five cents per gallon of kerosene. Since they handled Standard kerosene and competing products—an intolerable situation for Rockefeller—and often cared more about gouging consumers than expanding markets, he decided to get rid of them.

It thus seems fitting that John D. Rockefeller, the archetypal capitalist, betrayed a special affinity for accounting and an almost mystic faith in numbers. For Rockefeller, ledgers were sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotion. They gauged performance, exposed fraud, and ferreted out hidden inefficiencies.

By replacing turmoil with stability, a monopoly “may make fortresses out of what otherwise might be centers of devastation” and “in the end produce not only steadier but also greater expansion of total output than could be secured by an entirely uncontrolled onward rush that cannot fail to be studded with catastrophes.” Schumpeter imagined that entrepreneurs wouldn’t commit large sums to risky ventures if the future seemed cloudy and new competitors could easily spoil their plans. “On the one hand, largest-scale plans could in many cases not materialize at all if it were not known from the outset that competition will be discouraged by heavy capital requirements or lack of experience, or that means are available to discourage or checkmate it so as to gain the time and space for further developments.”

As the capstone of this system, Rockefeller fostered an extensive intelligence network, assembling thick card catalogs with monthly reports from field agents, showing every barrel of oil sold by independent marketers in their territory. From 26 Broadway, the titan could peer into the most distant corners of his realm. ... Standard’s reputation as a pervasive, all-seeing presence was richly deserved.