How 'trust busters' broke up monopolies
In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court leveraged the Sherman Antitrust Act to fragment the Standard Oil monopoly into 34 separate entities, fundamentally reshaping American corporate law and the global energy industry.
The United States government dismantled the world's largest corporation when the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was an unreasonable monopoly. This 1911 landmark decision utilized the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to fragment John D. Rockefeller's empire into 34 independent companies, including the ancestors of modern-day ExxonMobil and Chevron.
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