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.
Levi Strauss was born Löb Strauß on February 26, 1829, in Buttenheim, a small village in the Kingdom of Bavaria, the son of a Jewish dry-goods peddler named Hirsch Strauss. His father died of tuberculosis around 1846, and in 1847 the eighteen-year-old Löb sailed with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his older brothers Jonas and Louis, who ran a wholesale dry-goods business in New York called J. Strauss Brother & Co. He anglicized his name to Levi and learned the trade from the inside.
In early 1853 Strauss became a U.S. citizen, and the following year — drawn by the California Gold Rush — he reached San Francisco to open a West Coast branch of the family business. He did not come to dig but to sell, importing clothing, fabric, thread, and household goods and supplying the dry-goods stores of the booming mining country. Over two decades he built a prosperous, respectable wholesaling house, Levi Strauss & Co., long before the product that would carry his name into history existed.
In 1872 a Reno, Nevada tailor and customer named Jacob W. Davis wrote to Strauss describing a method he had devised for reinforcing the stress points of men’s work pants with copper rivets. Davis lacked the money to file a patent and proposed that Strauss, his fabric supplier, become his partner. Strauss agreed and financed the application; on May 20, 1873, U.S. Patent No. 139,121 for “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings” was granted to Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss & Co., with half assigned to the firm. The riveted “waist overall” — the garment we now call blue jeans — was born.
Strauss never married and had no children, and he ran his firm until his death on September 26, 1902. Estimates of his estate vary, from a frequently cited figure of roughly $6 million to as much as $30 million, divided among his nephews and a long list of charities. He did not, strictly speaking, invent the blue jean alone — Jacob Davis did the inventing, and Strauss supplied the denim, the capital, the patent, and the company that turned a workman’s trouser into one of the most successful and imitated garments in the history of clothing.
Amadeo Peter Giannini was born on May 6, 1870, in San Jose, California, the son of Italian immigrants from Liguria, near Genoa. In 1876, when Amadeo was a small boy, his father Luigi was shot and killed by a worker in a dispute over a debt reported to be less than two dollars, leaving the child to be raised by his mother Virginia and, soon, his stepfather Lorenzo Scatena, a produce dealer. By his early teens Giannini was working before dawn in the wholesale produce markets of San Francisco, and by his early thirties he was a successful enough commission merchant to retire comfortably — a self-made man before he ever entered banking.
Giannini was pulled into finance almost by accident, taking a seat on the board of a small North Beach savings bank after his father-in-law’s death. Disgusted by how established banks served only the wealthy and ignored the immigrants, farmers, fishermen, and laborers who made up most of California, he founded the Bank of Italy on October 17, 1904, with $150,000 in capital raised from friends and family, to lend to exactly those people — the working-class ‘little fellow’ the financial establishment refused. He actively solicited the savings of ordinary depositors and, almost unheard of at the time, lent to them on the strength of their character and labor.
His defining moment came in the catastrophe of April 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed the city. Giannini got his bank’s gold and cash out of the disaster zone before the flames reached his building, hid it, and within days was lending to residents and businesses from a makeshift counter — a plank laid across barrels on the wharf — while larger banks kept their vaults sealed shut for weeks. That decision to lend when everyone else froze made his reputation and helped rebuild the city.
Over the following decades Giannini pioneered branch banking across California, built a holding company, Transamerica, and ultimately gave his institution the name under which it became the largest bank in the world: Bank of America. Yet he deliberately refused to make himself enormously rich. He repeatedly capped or gave back his own compensation, once saying that his ‘hardest job was to keep from becoming a millionaire,’ and channeled wealth into a foundation and into the bank’s mission rather than a personal fortune. When he died on June 3, 1949, his institution held some $6 billion in assets across 522 branches and was the largest commercial bank in the world — yet his personal estate came to only about $489,000, exactly as he had intended.
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.
Josephine Esther Mentzer was born on July 1, 1908, above the family’s life in working-class Corona, Queens, the daughter of Hungarian and Czech Jewish immigrants who ran a hardware store and feed business. There was no money for luxury and no inherited fortune; what she absorbed instead was the daily grind of retail — minding the counter, learning what made customers buy, and discovering that she loved selling. The decisive influence of her girlhood was her uncle, John Schotz, a chemist who came to live with the family and concocted skin creams in a makeshift lab. The teenager became his apprentice, learning to make and, more importantly, to demonstrate the creams she would one day sell as her own.
For years she sold those creams the hard way — face to face, in beauty salons and hair parlors, applying them to women’s skin while she talked. That tactile, demonstrate-and-touch method became the seed of a marketing philosophy that would reshape an industry. In 1946 she and her husband, Joseph Lauter — they had adjusted the spelling to Lauder — formally founded Estée Lauder Cosmetics with a handful of products, mixing them in a former restaurant kitchen. Two years later she talked her way into a landmark order from Saks Fifth Avenue, and the modern company was born.
From that beginning Lauder built one of the largest and most profitable cosmetics companies in the world, kept tightly under family control until it went public in 1995. She pioneered the free-sample and ‘gift with purchase’ techniques now universal in the industry, launched the blockbuster fragrance Youth Dew in 1953, and added brands including Aramis and the dermatologist-positioned Clinique. By the time she died in 2004 her name fronted a global empire, and she was the only woman named to Time magazine’s 1998 list of the twenty most influential business geniuses of the twentieth century.
Hers is a rise from genuine immigrant modesty to vast fortune built almost entirely on salesmanship, persistence, and an instinct for how women wished to feel — a fortune made one demonstration, one sample, one counter at a time.
András István Gróf was born on September 2, 1936, into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a dairyman. His childhood was shaped by catastrophe. As a small boy he survived a near-fatal case of scarlet fever that permanently damaged his hearing, and during the Second World War he and his mother survived the Nazi and Hungarian Arrow Cross persecution of Hungary’s Jews by hiding under false identities while his father was taken to a labor camp. He told this story in his memoir, Swimming Across.
A decade later, history nearly swallowed him again. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the twenty-year-old fled across the border to Austria and made his way to the United States as a refugee, arriving in 1957 nearly penniless and speaking little English. He Anglicized his name to Andrew Grove, worked his way through the City College of New York to a degree in chemical engineering in 1960, and went on to earn a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963.
Grove joined the semiconductor industry at its birth. After working at Fairchild Semiconductor, he became one of the very first employees of Intel when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded it in 1968 — effectively their operational right hand. Over the next three decades he rose to president in 1979 and chief executive in 1987, and it was Grove, as much as anyone, who built Intel into the dominant force in microprocessors and the engine of the personal-computer era.
Under his leadership Intel made the pivotal, painful decision to abandon the memory-chip business it had pioneered and bet the company on microprocessors — a gamble that made it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1997, Grove was a refugee with damaged hearing and no money who became one of the defining figures of the computer age, and a celebrated teacher of management besides.