some facts about John D Rockefeller:
- in 1905, state attorneys general started trying to serve him with subpoenas for various antitrust cases
- he then spent the next two years as a fugitive hiding from hordes of process servers from different states
- eventually, one judge from Chicago agreed to grant him criminal immunity in exchange for testifying, because it would be such a coup to actually get him in front of a court
- (which pissed off Teddy Roosevelt, who had been hoping to prosecute him for federal crimes)
- he agreed to testify, and then just acted senile and talked extremely slowly
- in retaliation, the judge ordered a fine of $29 million (like $1b in 2022 dollars), way higher than any fine in American corporate history thus far
- this precipitated a stock market downturn that led to the Panic of 1907, in which the market fell almost 50%
- when Rockefeller got a call that the stock market was crashing he called up the AP and told them that he would give half of his net worth to bail out the stock market
- and he in fact did team up with JP Morgan, spend millions on bailouts, and help restore public confidence