oil companies

"According to his later account, Getty considered the Nancy Taylor prospect promising, but knew that older and better-established operators would be able to outbid him. Accordingly, he persuaded a bank to send one of its executives to bid in his name, without revealing his identity. Some of the wildcatters assumed that the banker must be bidding for one of the major oil companies, which would be prepared to top all offers. Others owed money to the bank and were therefore unwilling to bid against its representative. Thanks to his ruse, Getty recounted, all of his potential competitors sat out the auction, allowing him to obtain the lease for the pittance of $500. That, at least, is how Getty told the story. Independent evidence suggests that the other wildcatters passed on Nancy Taylor simply be¬ cause it seemed a poor prospect. Perhaps Getty embellished the story over the years, but there is no question that he struck oil on the property. He then sold it to a refiner, reaping $11,850 as his 30 percent share of the profit.21"

"All businesses have problems. It’s the problems that create the opportunities. If a business is easy, every simple bastard would enter it. In a sense, that was my problem with Pronto: the only barrier to entry in the “bantam market” field was capital. Anyone with enough capital could and did enter the field until overdevelopment caused the entire opportunity to crash and burn in the 1980s, leaving it in the hands of those with the most capital, like the oil companies."