In the aftermath of the Sherman Antitrust Act coming into force on the backdrop of an overwhelming majority vote in Congress, Standard Oil was the first casualty as the Ohio Attorney General sued it for violation of antitrust laws. As of 1890, Standard Oil controlled almost ninety percent of the market, and it is no surprise that it got into the crosshairs of the antitrust agencies (Imsirovic, 2021). The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the court upheld that Standard Oil had violated antitrust regulations enshrined in the Sherman Antitrust Act. Subsequently, the government broke down Standard Oil into thirty-four separate companies to kill the monopoly and restore fair trade.
