Morgan was born in 1837 at the opposite end of the social scale from Carnegie, Morgan being the son of a very successful Connecticut businessman and banker, schooled in his youth at fashionable schools in Boston, Switzerland and Germany.  Finishing his schooling, he joined his father's banking office in London for a year before returning to the States to work for his father's company in New York City.  He was a clever financier, for instance during the Civil War purchasing 5,000 rifles from a Union depot at $3.50 and then reselling them to the U.S. Army for $22 each!

Over the years he demonstrated his skill at buying up struggling companies at bargain rates and then reorganizing them into profitable operations. He even at one point came to the aid of the U.S. Treasury in the midst of the Panic of 1893, when by 1895 the Federal Treasury was nearly out of gold and facing financial default.  Morgan joined with the Rothschild bankers of Paris to offer to sell the government 3.5 million ounces of gold in exchange for thirty-year bonds.  At first U.S. President Cleveland turned down the offer, but then realizing how close the government was to default, finally accepted Morgan's offer.  It indeed saved the status of the U.S. Treasury, but undercut Cleveland's standing with the agrarian wing of his Democratic Party.

Again in 1907 Morgan stepped in to rescue the American economy, this time caused by a massive sell-off on Wall Street after the failure of a large copper venture threatened to pull down a number of banks that had invested heavily in the venture (actually Knickerbocker, New York's third largest trust company, did fail).  This crisis was so big that Morgan did not attempt to answer the challenge alone, but gathered a number of other New York banks to join him in putting money back into Wall Street and restoring investors' confidence, thus averting a stock market collapse.

Another crisis soon followed, this time caused by the collapse of a major industrial conglomerate invested in coal, iron, and railroads.  With President Teddy Roosevelt's permission, Morgan stepped in to take over the fallen conglomerate, aware that this would invite charges of monopolistic behavior.  But it had to be done to avert yet another panic in the world of American investment.

But as a result of these interventions, the U.S. government finally (1913) made the move to set up a government agency, the Federal Reserve, to intervene when such economic crises began to show signs of developing. In a sense, Morgan himself had shown the U.S. government the proper procedure by which to intervene when necessary, contributing greatly to the stability of the U.S. economy, which throughout the 1800s had experienced one speculative crisis after another.

Rockefeller was raised in tough circumstances in upstate New York and then in Ohio, his father being a wandering con-man who only infrequently visited the home, his mother however being a very strong, positive influence on his life.  As a youth he proved himself to be very bright, quick with numbers, hard-working, and loving learning, putting himself through a large amount of schooling.  He was also a person of deep Christian faith.  Together these elements made him an eager challenger of the larger world.

During the Civil War he and his brother raised the capital to found a business providing produce to the Union armies, and then the two of them in 1863 joined a team of investors to build in Cleveland's fast-growing industrial area an oil refinery designed to produce kerosene, helping to move the country away from expensive whale oil as the source of its lighting.  In 1865 he bought out the leading partners of the business and through considerable borrowing put himself (and the remaining investors, including his brother) in a well-placed position within an economy turning more and more to the use of kerosene.

By 1870 he moved to establish the Standard Oil Company, which quickly became Ohio's largest oil company.  Then moving into the shipping business, he was able to acquire for his oil business special railroad rates that allowed him vast advantage in his competition with smaller oil companies, which he was quick to buy out when they stumbled.  Then in 1874 he signed a secret deal with his largest New York competitors, Pratt and Rogers, to buy out their oil company and bring the two on his company as partners.  And thus Rockefeller proceeded to move through the infant oil industry, buying out company after company until, by the end of the 1870s, Standard Oil owned 90 percent of America's oil business.  He even at one point took on the huge Pennsylvania Railroad Company, starting a price war in shipping rates, which finally forced the railroad to sell its own oil interests to Standard Oil (actually Rockefeller was moving away from shipping by rail to shipping by pipeline).  But this in turn brought charges of monopolistic practices (not the first time, however, nor the last) in the courts of Pennsylvania and other states.  These court cases Rockefeller found himself battling constantly, gaining for Rockefeller a very negative national reputation.

Adding to this negative image was when in 1882 Rockefeller set up the Standard Oil Trust, a move to bring the many separate state corporations under a single domain (at that time companies were licensed to operate within only the state granting the corporate license).  Not only did the creation of this new trust produce a huge outcry of monopoly in the nation's press, other corporations, seeing the benefits of this move, were quick to set up similar organizations, birthing the age of the massive American trust companies.  He also birthed the practice (taken up by New York's National Petroleum Exchange) of selling oil futures on the open market as shares or certificates based on oil held in storage, thus making the pricing of oil a public matter.

Eventually Rockefeller ventured into the growing world of international oil production, then moved from kerosene production into the business of natural gas, and even the refinement of gasoline (previously considered just a wasteful byproduct of kerosene production), just as the world of automobiles, with their new internal combustion engines, was opening up.

But the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, originally designed to break up labor organizations, would soon be turned against Rockefeller, especially as he moved to acquire oil fields in other American states, his vast oil fields in Pennsylvania beginning to play out.  He also entered the business of iron ore production and shipment with Carnegie, causing a huge public uproar.

With the arrival of the 20th century, Rockefeller found himself under constant attack, by U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, wielding the Sherman Antitrust Act wherever he could; by Ida Tarbell, publishing a lengthy exposé on Standard Oil’s underhanded business practices; and finally in 1911 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which handed down the decision that as a monopoly violating the Sherman Act, Standard Oil had to be broken up into thirty-four separate companies (eventually becoming Conoco, Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, Sohio, Pennzoil, etc.).  Yet Rockefeller remained a significant stockholder in these various companies, and the oil business continued to be personally very profitable for Rockefeller.  This eventually made Rockefeller the richest man in the world at the time (and by comparison, even still today!).

But like Carnegie, Rockefeller’s business sense was based on a larger view of his responsibilities to the world around him.  He never saw the making of money as evil, seeing how though some people would fall by the wayside in the competitive world of business and finance, the overall effect was clearly one of economic advancement for the society as a whole.

True, some benefitted vastly more than others in this trend, but even here Rockefeller felt a sense of responsibility to his world, setting up charity organizations designed to help the young and ambitious climb to greater social heights. Indeed, this was part of his understanding of his Christian responsibilities, which began with his church tithing even as a teenager, and which interestingly included teaching Bible at the Baptist church he attended as an adult.  But his charity helped turn by 1900 a small Baptist college into the University of Chicago, his grants to church mission produced the Central Philippine University in 1905, and ultimately his sense of charity led to the creation of an outstanding medical research center in New York City.  In 1913 he established the Rockefeller Foundation, granting it $250 million to aid in medical research and training, and in 1918, granted $550 million for another foundation (later absorbed into the Rockefeller Foundation) for social research.