Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Business Rags to Riches A Comparative Essay on JD Rockefeller and Ted Turner Rags to Riches A Comparative Essay on JD Rockefeller and Ted Turner Rags to Riches: John D. Rockefeller and Ted Turner “Yet among men there are some endowed with vision, an insight more penetrating and more sustained. To their liberated spirit the world unfolds a farther prospect.” These words were spoken by Carleton Noyes to his class as they were analyzing The Harvard Classics (collection of poetry). This phrase means to reflect the driving genius behind such philanthropist entrepreneurs as John D. Rockefeller and Ted Turner. Both of these ‘supermen’ have displayed great determination in their lives, enabling each to accomplish far and above more mortal men. Ted Turner, for example, won the America’s Cup despite the fact that he had never been trained in competitive sailing. J. D. Rockefeller continued his work with the transportation and refining of oil though he was publicly excoriated for his merciless tactics of “winning at all costs.” We will seek to examine how determination, risk-taking, self-confidence, and vision enabled these men to excel in their respective lives. Ted Turner was born as Robert Edward Turner in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1938. At age nine, Turner and his family moved to Atlanta, Georgia where his father began a billboard company. He was educated at the Georgia Military Academy in Tennessee, where he was given the nickname “Terrible Ted,” due to his interest and practice of taxidermy and his growing of grass in his room. Thereafter, Turner attended Brown University, where he took up yachting and became a master debater. He was later expelled from Brown for violating dormitory visitation rules. In 1963, Turner’s father committed suicide because of emotional distress over his failing billboard business. When Ted initially inherited the business, he planned to sell it because of the substantial debt it had accrued, but reminded of his father’s legacy, he decided to try to run the company himself. Slowly, he paid off the debts, though many people were sure that like his father, he would also fail at his endeavor. However, within a few years, his father’s business was rebuilt into a successful enterprise. In 1970, Turner bought a struggling UHF (ultrahigh frequency) television channel in Atlanta. At this time this station was the least popular of Atlanta’s channels because of its barren, uninteresting content. It provided Atlanta with only the minimal news required by the FCC. Original programming was never introduced, only reruns of black-and-white films were broadcast. Within three years of purchasing this television station, Turner turned it into a profitable company by offering low-cost sports and entertainment to the public. By 1975, this initially local television system, now named Turner Broadcasting Systems (TBS), had gained a nationwide audience and was given the nickname ‘Superstation’. A year later, Turner bought the Atlanta Braves for a mere $11 million, thus saving the near bankrupt baseball team from a certain demise. Since then, we recognize the Atlanta Braves as World Series champions and inevitable yearly contenders. In 1977, Ted Turner bought yet another Atlanta enterprise, the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. In the same year, he skippered the winning yacht the Courageous in the America’s Cup race against Australia. In 1980, Turner founded the Cable News Network (CNN), the first twenty-four hour television news station. This idea was tremendously innovative and no expert in the industry would have it to be a successful. However, through its continuous live coverage of breaking stories around the world, it has become a highly respected news station and has gained global viewership. Five years after the birth of CNN Ted Turner made the purchase of the MGM/UA entertainment company, which includes the Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer and United Artists film studios. Very shortly thereafter, Turner sold the company, but kept the entire MGM film library. Thus, he had paid $1.6 million for only the film library, which did include such classics as Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane. Three years later, in 1988, Ted launched Turner Network Television (TNT) and ironically, many of the MGM films are shown on this channel. This station is currently viewed by an approximate sixty-one million homes across America. Thus, a relatively failed endeavor was turned into gold by his Midas touch. The year 1990 found Ted launching a network that stretched across the southeast named SportSouth. This network provided coverage of Atlanta Braves baseball, Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Hornets basketball, college football, auto racing, and every other conceivable major sporting event. This was a joint company that was shared with the Scripps Howard and Liberty Media companies. This station was only available in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Eventually, Turner sold the network to FOX Sports. In 1993, Turner bought yet another set of motion picture studios, New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment. In 1996, Time Warner bought TBS from Ted Turner for $7.6 billion. This acquisition made Time Warner the world’s largest media and entertainment company. Turner was made the vice-chairman of Time Warner, Inc.’s board of directors and head of the division containing TBS Business. Through this business transaction, he had gained additional control of Cartoon Network, E! Entertainment, and Comedy Central. The next year, Turner donated $1 billion to the United Nations Humanitarian Causes. This was considered one of the single most charitable donations in history. At the announcement of this donation of money, Turner jokingly commented that the UN had best appreciate this grant of money because he was pushing himself down the list of Forbes Magazine’s twenty-five richest Americans. Although experiencing several setbacks throughout his life, with each of these calamities Turner’s determination to succeed seemed to harden. This inherent resiliance is also characteristic of John D. Rockefeller in times of adversity. Rockefeller was born in Richford, New York on July 8, 1839. He was the second of six children born to William A. and Eliza Davidson Rockefeller. At the age of thirteen he moved with his family to a farm near Cleveland. Even from his early childhood, he displayed merciless business tactics when he bought candies for wholesale and resold them to his siblings at an inflated price for profit. While he was attending Cleveland Central High School, he rented a room in the city and joined the Erie Street Baptist Church, of which he became trustee of at age twenty-one. His resultant strict beliefs in the Baptist faith influenced him to despise luxury and to reinvest all of his profits from his future businesses. Rockefeller left high school in 1855 to take a business course at Folsom Mercantile College and completed the six-month class in a period of three months with high honors. After looking for a job in Cleveland for six weeks, he was finally employed as an assistant bookkeeper at Hewitt & Tuttle, a small firm of merchants and shippers and was quickly promoted to cashier and bookkeeper. In 1859, Rockefeller formed a partnership in a non-descript business with his friend, Maurice B. Clark. During the same time, oil had been discovered at Titusville, Pennsylvania and with the rise in the petroleum industry, Cleveland became a major refining center. Rockefeller and Clark found themselves entering the oil refining business with an oil experienced partner, Samuel Andrews. Beginning their own oil refinery, the refinery produced naphtha and kerosene. Rockefeller was constantly reinvesting the profits of the business and keeping costs and wages as low as possible. In 1865 there were several disputes among the partners (now five in number) about some of the company’s business affairs. It was agreed that shares of the business would be sold to the highest bidder of the group. Rockefeller bought it for $72,500 and with Samuel Andrews formed Rockefeller & Andrews. Rockefeller’s business became increasingly more profitable due to the expansion of the oil industry. The use of kerosene lighting had become popular as one of the reasons this industry had grown so quickly. In 1870, Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company with his brother William, Samuel Andrews, and several others. At the time, the business had a net worth of approximately $1 million. By 1872, Standard Oil had monopolized all of the petroleum refineries in the Cleveland areas and several in New York City. The company ultimately expanded its operations to include barrel making, paint, and glue units and processed 29,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Rockefeller helped to form the South Improvement Company, which included all of the largest oil refineries in Cleveland. This arrangement forced the railroads to offer a reduced price for members of the South Improvement Company in shipping oil. Outside competing oil refineries were made to pay $2.56 per barrel while members paid only $1.56. Interestingly, for Rockefeller the price was only $0.56! By1879, Rockefeller had managed to control through acquisition almost all of the oil pipelines in the U. S. Standard Oil was one of the most prosperous businesses in the United Stated and in 1882, it merged with the Standard Oil Trust to make one of the largest petroleum firms in the world. Its capital had skyrocketed to $70 million. Part of the reason as to why the Standard Oil Company was so successful is because neither Rockefeller nor his employees revealed to other companies the quantity of money they were making as to not create a controversy. Every one of Rockefeller’s employees were made to sign a contract promising that “…I as a gentleman will keep secret all transactions which I may have with the corporation…” Ten years later in 1892, the state court of Ohio forced Standard Oil to withdraw its merger. The two parts of the company later rejoined in New Jersey when the state had passed a law that permitted a parent company to own the stock of other companies. At this time, the Standard Oil Company owned 75% of the petroleum business. Rockefeller not only made his fortune in the oil industry, but also owned iron mines and timberland and invested his money in other companies. In 1896, Rockefeller stepped down from active leadership in Standard Oil, and in 1911 the government again found that the Standard Oil trust was a violation of the anti-trust laws. The government ordered the immediate separation of this New Jersey corporation. The thirty-eight companies that Standard Oil owned were forced to comply with this separation and become individual firms. Rockefeller’s fortune amounted to approximately $1 billion. The net worth of his companies was estimated at about $550 million. Eighty percent of this money was given to four charities founded and organized by Rockefeller, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (Rockefeller University), and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Rockefeller died at age ninety-seven at Ormond Beach, Florida on May 23rd, 1937. At his funeral, his friend Jerome Greene called him “the most unemotional man I have ever known”. Both Ted Turner and J. D. Rockefeller attempted to monopolize their industries. Ted Turner has managed to control a majority of the cable television networks as a media mogul, while Rockefeller controlled eighty percent of the United States’ oil industry. The Standard Oil Company was ultimately forced to separate and made much less powerful, but Ted Turner’s businesses have never been questioned by the government. Both these men came from relative obscurity and became self-made industrial giants despite adversity. Turner tended to “have a weak spot for lost causes once they’re really lost,” which has been the reason why some people call him a ‘modern day Rhett Butler’. Rockefeller, on the other hand, did not try to save failing businesses but created his own companies and monopolized others. Many people came to dislike Rockefeller because of his hard, business tactics and unemotional personality, despite his donations to charities. Ted Turner is a quirky, generally well-liked individual with a sense of humor that sometimes gets him into trouble with some groups of people (i.e. the Polish and Christians who have taken issue with his public remarks) and for these he is labeled “The Mouth of the South”. His generous donations never go unnoticed by the general public as did those of Rockefeller. Ted Turner and J. D. Rockefeller are quite different personalities, as were the times and the industries in which these two men were involved. Perhaps in retrospect there is more commonality than differences. It seems inevitable that innovative and successful men and women will stir controversy not only on a local, but on a national level. The larger the persona, the larger the issues and the more people and government may seek to restrain their efforts. It is interesting to contemplate an individual’s achievement without such interventions. These two men serve as examples of how “man’s reach should extend beyond his grasp” and as such the sky may not be the limit. Bibliography: Bibliography  Bibb, Porter. Ted Turner: It Ain’t as Easy as it Looks. Boulder. Johnson Books. 1997  Carr, Albert Z. John D. Rockefeller’s Secret Weapon. London. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. 1962  Chernow, Ron. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. New York. Vintage Books, A Division of Random House. 1998  Lowe, Janet. Ted Turner Speaks: Insight from the World’s Greatest Maverick. New York. John Wiley & Sons. 1999  O’Connor, Richard. The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur. Toronto. Little, Brown, and Company. 1971 Word Count: 2114
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