Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 in a weaver’s cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, the son of a handloom weaver whose trade was being destroyed by the power looms of the Industrial Revolution. The family emigrated to the United States in 1848 in near-poverty, settling near Pittsburgh, where thirteen-year-old Andrew went to work in a cotton mill as a bobbin boy for about $1.20 a week. Roughly half a century later he sold the Carnegie Steel Company to J. P. Morgan for $480 million and was, by most reckonings, the richest man in the world.
His rise is the archetypal American rags-to-riches story, and unusually for the genre it is exhaustively documented — in his own bestselling Autobiography, in company records, and in the public sale that created U.S. Steel in 1901. Carnegie climbed from the mill floor to the telegraph office to the Pennsylvania Railroad, learned how capital and information moved, invested shrewdly, and then bet everything on steel at the exact moment America was building its railroads, bridges, and skyscrapers out of it.
What sets Carnegie apart from the other titans of the Gilded Age is what he did next. Having argued in his 1889 essay ‘The Gospel of Wealth’ that a rich man who dies rich ‘dies disgraced,’ he spent the last eighteen years of his life giving nearly all of his fortune away — some $350 million, the equivalent of many billions today — to libraries, universities, science, and the cause of world peace. He funded over 2,500 public libraries, founded what became Carnegie Mellon University, and built Carnegie Hall.
He was also the man whose company crushed its workers at the Homestead strike of 1892, a bloody episode he was careful to be abroad for and never fully lived down. The full Carnegie story is therefore both halves of the Wheel of Fortune at once: a genuine rise from nothing, and a fortune built on labor he paid as little as he could — given away, at the end, on a scale no one had attempted before.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on May 27, 1794, into a family of modest Dutch farmers and boatmen on Staten Island, then a rural fringe of New York. He had almost no schooling, leaving the classroom around age eleven to work the water with his father, and by sixteen he was running his own small ferry across New York Harbor. He could barely read and write all his life, signed documents in a cramped scrawl, and was famously profane and abrasive. He was also one of the most relentless and gifted businessmen the country ever produced.
From a single sailboat ferrying passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan, Vanderbilt built first a steamboat empire and then, late in life, a railroad empire, earning the lifelong nickname ‘the Commodore.’ By his death in 1877 he had amassed a fortune estimated at over $100 million — a sum often described as larger than the amount then held in the United States Treasury, and the greatest American fortune of its time. He founded the dynasty whose later spectacular decline is a story told elsewhere; this entry is about the rise.
Vanderbilt’s method was competition pushed to its limit. He learned the steamboat business inside the legal fight that broke the monopolies controlling American waters, then turned the resulting open competition into a weapon, slashing fares until rivals either failed or paid him handsomely to take his boats elsewhere. He built faster, ran cheaper, and squeezed harder than anyone, and he was willing to be bought off — collecting what amounted to legalized extortion from competitors who could not survive a price war with him.
His is one of the era’s purest rises from working-class origins, owing nothing to inheritance, education, or social connection. It is also a fortune built through ruthless tactics, sharp dealing, and at times open contempt for the law and for the partners he outflanked. Vanderbilt left almost the entire fortune to a single son, a concentration of wealth that powered the dynasty’s brief glittering peak — and, by being neither widely shared nor given away, set the stage for its eventual dissipation.
Aristotle Socrates Onassis was born on January 20, 1906, into the prosperous Greek community of Smyrna (modern İzmir), then a cosmopolitan Ottoman port. That world was annihilated in September 1922, when Turkish forces retook the city at the close of the Greco-Turkish War and the Greek and Armenian quarters burned in what Greeks remember as the Catastrophe of Smyrna. The Onassis family’s businesses and property were lost, his father was imprisoned, and several relatives — three uncles, an aunt, her husband, and their daughter — died in a church fire at Akhisar. Barely sixteen, Aristotle escaped, and in 1923 he sailed to Argentina on a Nansen passport with only about $250 to his name.
In Buenos Aires he took a night job as a telephone operator with the British United River Plate Telephone Company, using the lines to sharpen his English and absorb how business was done, while studying commerce on the side. He then built an import business in Oriental (Turkish-style) tobacco, reportedly earning around $100,000 in commissions within a couple of years and taking Argentine citizenship in 1929. The tobacco trade made his first real money and taught him how goods moved across oceans. In the depths of the Great Depression he made the move that defined him: in 1932 he bought six idle Canadian National freighters for roughly $20,000 each — a fraction of their value — gambling that shipping would recover. It did.
From that counter-cyclical bet Onassis built one of the largest privately held shipping fleets in the world, eventually exceeding seventy vessels. He was an early and aggressive builder of oil tankers — his Ariston, delivered in 1938, was the largest tanker afloat — and then of the giant ‘supertankers’ that carried Middle Eastern crude to a booming postwar West. He ran a whaling fleet, founded the national airline Olympic Airways in 1957, and for a time controlled the company that operated Monte Carlo’s casino and resorts. By the 1950s and 1960s he was routinely described as the world’s richest shipowner.
Onassis became as famous for his life as for his fleet — his private Aegean island of Skorpios, his yacht the Christina, his long affair with the opera star Maria Callas, and his 1968 marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the assassinated U.S. president. The glamour sat atop genuine self-invention: a stateless teenage refugee who arrived with a couple of hundred dollars and died in 1975 with an estate valued at over $500 million. The end was shadowed by grief — the 1973 death of his only son, Alexander, in a plane crash broke him — and his empire did not long survive him intact.
Li Ka-shing was born on July 29, 1928, in Chaozhou (Chiu Chow), in Guangdong province in southern China, into a family of schoolteachers of modest means. When Japan invaded, the family fled as refugees to Hong Kong around 1940, arriving with little. His father, a teacher, contracted tuberculosis and died a few years later, and Li — the eldest son, still a boy of about fifteen — left school to support his mother and younger siblings, taking work in a plastics trading firm where he rose quickly from menial labor to salesman.
In 1950, at about twenty-two, Li used his savings and borrowed money to start his own small manufacturer, which he named Cheung Kong (Yangtze River) Industries. The firm’s breakthrough was plastic flowers, cheap and lifelike imitations he learned to make after studying Italian techniques; they became a hit in the postwar West, and the export profits gave Li his first real capital. From that foundation he made the pivot that built the fortune: he poured manufacturing profits into Hong Kong real estate, buying property and land when prices were depressed — including during the unrest of the late 1960s — and holding for the long rise that followed.
Cheung Kong Holdings went public in 1972, and in 1979 Li made the move that announced him as a major force: he acquired control of Hutchison Whampoa, one of the great British-run trading houses, or ‘hongs,’ becoming the first ethnic Chinese to take over such a colonial-era conglomerate. Over the following decades he expanded across ports, retail, telecommunications, energy, and utilities on several continents, earning the nickname ‘Superman’ for his deal-making. He became, for years running, the richest man in Asia, with a fortune Forbes has placed in the tens of billions of dollars.
Li is a living person, and the public record of his rise is unusually well documented. He retired from the chairmanship of his companies — restructured into CK Hutchison Holdings and CK Asset Holdings — in May 2018 at the age of 89, handing control to his elder son, Victor Li. Through the Li Ka Shing Foundation, which he established in 1980 and has called his ‘third son,’ he has given billions of dollars to education and medical causes, most prominently founding and funding Shantou University in his home province. His story is the archetypal postwar Hong Kong rise from refugee poverty to global wealth.