Was Rockefeller’s monopoly necessary?

It's complicated. In a way, at least my understanding of it is that an important part of the reason for his monopoly was that only a tremendously powerful oil company would have the bargaining leverage to compete with, to control the monopoly power of the railroads. So in a way, Rockefeller was a counter bearing weight to the power of the railroads. There were probably in the early stages, substantial advantages to that unification of resources. By the time Standard Oil was broken up, I think it's pretty clear that the usefulness of that monopoly had passed. And you can see by the fact that there don't seem to have been any big costs to breaking Standard Oil up into a number of component companies. It’s probably true that in 1885, there were a lot of gains to having a unified oil industry. By 1915, they were probably long since dissipated.