Short answers, pulled from the story.
John D. Rockefeller was an American businessman and philanthropist who founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870. He became one of the wealthiest Americans of all time and the first billionaire in the United States, with a fortune worth nearly 2 percent of the national economy.
John D. Rockefeller was born on the 8th of July 1839 in Richford, New York, and died on the 23rd of May 1937 at The Casements, his home in Ormond Beach, Florida. He died of arteriosclerosis, less than two months shy of his 98th birthday.
Rockefeller bought out the least efficient competitors, improved operations, pressed for shipping rebates, undercut rivals, and made secret deals. In 1872, during the so-called Cleveland Conquest, Standard Oil absorbed 22 of its 26 Cleveland competitors, and by 1900 it controlled about 90 percent of the nation's oil production.
In 1911 the Supreme Court of the United States found Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered it broken into 34 new companies. These included firms that became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Amoco, some of which remain among the largest companies in the world.
Rockefeller donated about $530 million in total, funding the University of Chicago, Rockefeller University, the Rockefeller Foundation created in 1913, and Spelman College. His foundations helped eradicate hookworm in the American South and built the Peking Union Medical College in China.
Rockefeller's personal wealth was estimated in 1913 at $900 million, almost 3 percent of the US gross domestic product of $39.1 billion that year. As a percentage of US GDP, no other American fortune would come close, making him by some measures the wealthiest known person in recent history.
Ida Tarbell published The History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904, documenting the firm's espionage, price wars, and courtroom evasions. Her father had been driven out of the oil business during the South Improvement Company affair, and Rockefeller privately called her Miss Tarbarrel.