Marathon Oil in North America, including $600 million in the Eagle Ford and $200 million in the Bakken formation. The company owns 277,000 net acres in the Bakken formation. Marathon began as The Ohio Oil Company in 1887. In 1889, it was purchased by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. It remained a part of Standard Oil until Standard Oil was broken in 1911. In 1930, The Ohio Oil Company bought the Transcontinental Oil Company and established the "Marathon" brand name. In 1962, the company changed its name to "Marathon Oil Company". In 1982, Mobil made a hostile offer to buy the company;
Standard Oil ruled in 1911 that antitrust law required Standard Oil to be broken into smaller, independent companies. Among the "baby Standards" that still exist are ExxonMobil and Chevron. Some have speculated that if not for that court ruling, Standard Oil could have possibly been worth more than $1 trillion in the 2000s. Whether the breakup of Standard Oil was beneficial is a matter of some controversy. Some economists believe that Standard Oil was not a monopoly, and also argue that the intense free market competition resulted in cheaper oil prices and more diverse petroleum products. Critics claimed that success in meeting