Long before Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk lived the original business “Titan”: John D Rockefeller.

His vast empire and equally vast philanthropy provided a template for today’s billionaires, but where did the money come from? And are there lessons for today’s entrepreneurs?

When Ron Chernow agreed to write the first full-length biography of Rockefeller since the 1950s, he aimed to get beneath the folksy, grandfatherly image of Rockefeller’s later years, and expose the rapacious monopolist of the younger man.

What made him so interesting, Chernow says, is that “his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad.” At the point where he was most vilified, he began focusing his considerable powers on giving away history’s greatest fortune for the benefit of humankind.

John Davison Rockefeller was fortunate in the timing of his birth, 1839. Along with Andrew Carnegie (1835), Jay Gould (1836) and J Pierpont Morgan (1837), he would come of age just as the post-Civil War industrial boom was about to get under way. A time of limitless possibility.

Rockefeller grew up a Baptist, in New York State. His father William, a charismatic entrepreneur, Chernow describes as a “bigamist and snake-oil salesman” who went around the country selling patent medicines.

With his father often away, John became the man of the house to his mother Eliza, and had early responsibilities. She came to trust totally in what she called “John’s judgement”. Ohio, where William had moved the family, was a fortuitous place for John to enter the adult world.

For the cost of setting up a shop, anyone could launch a crude oil refining operation producing kerosene, which was providing lantern light in houses and huts across America. By the time he was 25, John had a controlling interest in the biggest refinery in Cleveland.

He married Cettie Spelman, the daughter of well-to-do, cultured parents. They weren't keen on the match, as Rockefeller had little social standing, but he was persistent. Chernow: “in love as in business [Rockefeller] had a longer time frame, a more settled will, than other men."

The oil industry was then a wild frontier, with brothels, taverns and gambling dens littering the fields, and everyone out to make a quick buck. Yet  Rockefeller’s aim from the start was to tame it, rationalize it, and make it a respectable industry.