ExxonMobil in the context of "Mobil"

Big business involves large-scale corporate-controlled financial or business activities. As a term, it describes activities that run from "huge transactions" to the more general "doing big things". In corporate jargon, the concept is commonly known as enterprise, or activities involving enterprise customers.

The concept first rose in a symbolic sense after 1880 in connection with the combination movement that began in American business at that time. Some examples of American corporations that fall into the category of "big business" as of 2015 are ExxonMobil, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, Apple, General Electric, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs; in the United States, big businesses in general are sometimes collectively pejoratively called "corporate America". The largest German corporations as of 2012 included Daimler AG, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, and Deutsche Bank. SAP is Germany's largest software company. Among the largest companies in the United Kingdom as of 2012 are HSBC, Barclays, WPP plc, and BP. The latter half of the 19th century saw more technological advances and corporate growth in additional sectors, such as petroleum, machinery, chemicals, and electrical equipment (see Second Industrial Revolution).

The Fortune 1000 are the 1,000 largest American companies ranked by revenues, as compiled by the American business magazine Fortune. It only includes companies which are incorporated or authorized to do business in the United States, and for which revenues are publicly available (regardless of whether they are public companies listed on a stock market). The Fortune 500 is the subset of the list that is its 500 largest companies.

The list draws the attention of business readers seeking to learn the influential players in the American economy and prospective sales targets, as these companies tend to have large budgets and staff needs. Walmart was number one on the list for five of the seven years from 2007 to 2014, interrupted only by ExxonMobil in 2009 and 2012.

Flit (stylized in all caps) was the brand name for an insecticide. The original product, invented by chemist Dr. Franklin C. Nelson and launched in 1923 and mainly intended for killing flies and mosquitoes, was mineral oil based and manufactured by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, before the company, now part of ExxonMobil, was renamed first Esso and later Exxon. The Esso formulation contained 5% DDT in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before the negative environmental impact of DDT was widely understood. Later marketed as "Flit MLO", it has since been discontinued. A hand-operated atomizer called a Flit gun was commonly used to perform the spraying.

The Flit brand name has been reused for another insecticide product, with the primary active ingredient of permethrin, marketed by Clarke Mosquito Control. The current product is most often used to control adult mosquitoes. Spraying it into the air kills adult mosquitoes that are present and then by settling onto surfaces it kills mosquitoes that may later land.

Shell plc is a British multinational oil and gas company, headquartered in London, United Kingdom. Shell is a public limited company with a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and secondary listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New York Stock Exchange. A core component of Big Oil, Shell is the second largest investor-owned oil and gas company in the world by revenue (after ExxonMobil), and among the world's largest companies out of any industry. Measured by both its own emissions, and the emissions of all the fossil fuels it sells, Shell was the ninth-largest corporate producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the period 1988–2015.

Shell was formed in April 1907 through the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum Company of the Netherlands and The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company of the United Kingdom. The combined company rapidly became the leading competitor of the American Standard Oil and by 1920 Shell was the largest producer of oil in the world. Shell first entered the chemicals industry in 1929. Shell was one of the "Seven Sisters" which dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. In 1964, Shell was a partner in the world's first commercial sea transportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG). In 1970, Shell acquired the mining company Billiton, which it subsequently sold in 1994 and now forms part of BHP. In recent decades gas has become an increasingly important part of Shell's business and Shell acquired BG Group in 2016.

The Rockefeller family (/ˈrɒkəfɛlər/ ROCK-ə-fell-ər) is an American industrial, political, and banking family that owns one of the world's largest fortunes. The fortune was made in the American petroleum industry during the late 19th and early 20th centuries by brothers John D. Rockefeller and William A. Rockefeller Jr., primarily through Standard Oil (the predecessor of ExxonMobil and Chevron Corporation). The family had a long association with, and control of, Chase Manhattan Bank. By 1987, the Rockefellers were considered one of the most powerful families in American history.

The Rockefellers originated in the Rhineland in Germany and family members moved to the Americas in the early 18th century, while through Eliza Davison, with family roots in Middlesex County, New Jersey, John D. Rockefeller and William A. Rockefeller Jr. and their descendants are also of Scots-Irish ancestry.

From the mid-1980s to September 2003, the inflation-adjusted price of a barrel of crude oil on NYMEX was generally under $25/barrel. Then, during 2004, the price rose above $40, and then $60. A series of events led the price to exceed $60 by August 11, 2005, leading to a record-speed hike that reached $75 by the middle of 2006. Prices then dropped back to $60/barrel by the early part of 2007 before rising steeply again to $92/barrel by October 2007, and $99.29/barrel for December futures in New York on November 21, 2007. Throughout the first half of 2008, oil regularly reached record high prices. Prices on June 27, 2008, touched $141.71/barrel, for August delivery in the New York Mercantile Exchange, amid Libya's threat to cut output, and OPEC's president predicted prices may reach $170 by the Northern summer. The highest recorded price per barrel maximum of $147.02 was reached on July 11, 2008. After falling below $100 in the late summer of 2008, prices rose again in late September. On September 22, oil rose over $25 to $130 before settling again to $120.92, marking a record one-day gain of $16.37. Electronic crude oil trading was temporarily halted by NYMEX when the daily price rise limit of $10 was reached, but the limit was reset seconds later and trading resumed. By October 16, prices had fallen again to below $70, and on November 6 oil closed below $60. Then in 2009, prices went slightly higher, although not to the extent of the 2005–2007 crisis, exceeding $100 in 2011 and most of 2012. Since late 2013 the oil price has fallen below the $100 mark, plummeting below the $50 mark one year later.

As the price of producing petroleum did not rise significantly, the price increases have coincided with a period of record profits for the oil industry. Between 2004 and 2007, the profits of the six supermajors – ExxonMobil, Total, Shell, BP, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips – totaled $494.8 billion. Likewise, major oil-dependent countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Russia, Venezuela and Nigeria have benefited economically from surging oil prices during the 2000s.

Following the 1911 Supreme Court ruling that found Standard Oil was an illegal monopoly, the company was broken up into 39 different entities, divided primarily by region and activity. Many of these companies later became part of the Seven Sisters, which dominated global petroleum production in the 20th century, and became a majority of today's largest investor-owned oil companies, with most tracing their roots back to Standard Oil. Some descendants of Standard Oil were also given exclusive rights to the Standard Oil name.

Today, many of Standard Oil's 39 successor entities play roles in the oil industry, either on their own or through being acquired by other companies. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the controlling division of Standard Oil at the time of the 1911 breakup, continues to exist as ExxonMobil, formed from the merger of it and Standard Oil of New York. BP has also acquired many Standard Oil descendants, most notably Standard Oil of Ohio and Amoco (Standard Oil of Indiana). Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia, also traces its origins to Standard Oil as the Arab kingdom founded it in a partnership with Standard Oil of California, today known as Chevron Corporation. Other companies themselves not primarily focused on the petroleum industry have owned or previously owned Standard Oil descendants, including U.S. Steel (which previously owned Marathon Oil), the first incarnation of DuPont (which previously owned Conoco), and Unilever (which presently owns Chesebrough and Vaseline). Among Standard Oil's largest non-petroleum descendants is the credit bureau TransUnion, which originally was divested from the Standard-descending Union Tank Car Company.