John D. Rockefeller

Four planets of the ten sit in air signs and only one in earth, leaving three in water and two in fire. Air works out how a thing is assembled and what it will do next, which is the faculty of the organiser rather than the builder. Rockefeller built an oil monopoly the Supreme Court broke up, was probably the richest person in modern history, and gave away about half a billion dollars.

The Sun sits at sixteen degrees of Cancer and the Moon at sixteen of Gemini, a ninth of a degree apart by sign boundary, which is unusually close for two placements in neighbouring signs. Cancer accumulates and protects what it has; Gemini moves, connects and talks. A business built on controlling what moved through pipelines and railways rather than on what came out of the ground is exactly that pairing.

Mercury makes a quintile to Jupiter at an eighth of a degree, the tightest contact in the chart: an easy skill in matching speech to scale, which in a man whose instrument was the negotiated agreement is close to a job description. The Moon sits square Uranus at under half a degree. The three slowest planets were all in retrograde motion when he was born.

He died at Ormond Beach on 23 May 1937, at ninety seven. The Moon that day was gibbous and ninety eight per cent lit, the phase that keeps refining and rarely calls anything finished, which for somebody who spent his last decades giving away what the first ones had gathered is the apt sky. Neptune stood opposite his natal Uranus at a ninth of a degree, and the Sun had crossed into air against his natal water. For a chart with a single planet in earth, a life spent moving other people's oil rather than digging it is the reading that holds.