How the Richest Men in US History Made Their Money

The United States has long been fertile ground for generating immense personal wealth. It started with the nation’s founding, which coincided with the Industrial Revolution, a time of unprecedented technological change and social upheaval.

“2026 is the 250th anniversary of the United States, but it’s also the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations,” says John Steele Gordon, an economic historian and author. Smith argued that a country’s wealth comes not from hoarding gold and silver, as many people believed at the time, but from productive labor, trade and economic growth.

“The United States could follow Smithian precepts much more easily than more established economies could," says Gordon. "We didn’t have an aristocracy. We didn’t have a merchant class who protected their own interests. So we had a much freer economy.”

In a time before antitrust laws and financial regulations, American business was a winner-take-all competition with few rules or restrictions. The richest men in American history—yes, they were all men—were single-minded capitalists who saw the potential of new technologies to disrupt and reshape entire industries. Through brilliant and often devious means, they became the world’s first millionaires, billionaires and now trillionaires.

Here’s how America’s richest people made their money and how their fortunes shaped the nation’s history for better or worse.

[Note: Because wealth from the 19th and early 20th centuries is difficult to convert accurately into modern dollars, each individual’s fortune is also listed as a share of the gross national product (GNP) at the time, based on calculations by Michael M. Klepper and E. Gunther Robert in The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates, a Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present.]

Born in Germany in 1763, 20-year-old John Jacob Astor emigrated to the United States right after the Revolutionary War. After stints as a butcher, baker and musical instrument salesman in New York, Astor found his calling in the fur trade. Astor sourced pelts from Native Americans and frontier trappers and built his first fortune exporting furs to Europe and China.

When British and Canadian fur companies muscled into some of Astor’s territories in the western frontier, he successfully lobbied Congress to bar foreign-owned fur-trading companies from operating in U.S. territories, leaving Astor with a near monopoly of the lucrative fur trade.

“Having the government on your side is very helpful for an entrepreneur, and it’s funny how politicians always seem to find money useful,” says Gordon, author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. “So there’s some mutual back scratching.”

Flush with cash from his fur business, Astor pivoted to real estate in the early 1800s. When former Vice President Aaron Burr faced financial ruin after his arrest on treason charges, Astor purchased Burr’s large Manhattan landholdings at bargain prices. Over the next decades, as New York City grew at an exponential rate, Astor gobbled up huge swaths of Manhattan to build an unrivaled real estate dynasty. In the process, Astor became America’s first multimillionaire.

The Astor name was synonymous with outrageous wealth, and John Jacob’s heirs ruled New York society for a century. But when Astor died in 1848, he set a precedent by donating hefty sums of money to charity, including $400,000 (a small fortune) to build a free public library in Manhattan. His bequest eventually led to the creation of the New York Public Library.

“The idea that people who flourish abundantly in the American economy are expected to make major philanthropic gifts, that’s not a tradition in any other country in the world,” Gordon says.

Known to both his admirers and enemies as the “Commodore,” Cornelius Vanderbilt was the son of a New York farmer and ferry boat captain who amassed two separate fortunes during his lifetime.

After working on steamboats in his 20s, Vanderbilt went into business for himself, building boats and operating ferry lines in the bustling New York region. Vanderbilt was a shrewd and sometimes ruthless businessman who engaged in fierce fare wars with competitors, but he didn’t cut corners on his vessels, Gordon says.

“I have endless admiration for Vanderbilt,” Gordon says. “How did he make his money? By providing safe and cheap transportation. He was the biggest ship owner in the country, which is why he was known as the Commodore, and no ship owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt ever sank. He didn’t even insure them, because he said, I’ll maintain them, so they won’t blow up.”

When gold was discovered in California in 1848, Vanderbilt figured out a way to get East Coast steamship passengers to California faster via an overland shortcut across Nicaragua. During the Gold Rush, Vanderbilt’s steam ship empire earned him $1 million a year, an unheard-of sum.

But Vanderbilt’s true fortune was yet to come. In the 1860s, steamships began giving way to a world-changing new technology: the railroad.

“With railroads, the cost of shipping dropped precipitously,” Gordon says. “Whenever something lowers a fundamental input by an order of magnitude, there’s going to be a whole bunch of fortunes made that exploit that new technology.”

A savvy and deep-pocketed businessman, Vanderbilt started buying up railroads in his 70s. He applied the same principles that had built his steamship empire—ruthless competition, low prices and reliability—and Vanderbilt’s railroad investments added $90 million to his net worth before his death in 1877.

A notorious tightwad by reputation, Vanderbilt gave away little of his vast wealth during his lifetime aside from a $1 million gift to Central University in Nashville, Tennessee, which was later renamed Vanderbilt University in his honor.

Known as the “Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” Jay Gould made the most of the lawlessness that pervaded Gilded Age financial markets. Over his colorful career, he engaged in countless dirty tricks to outflank the competition—sometimes his fellow investors—and walk away with a pile of cash.

“Jay Gould was a speculator,” Gordon says. “He was less interested in running things than he was in manipulating stocks and bonds on Wall Street.”

In 1868, Gould famously clashed with Cornelius Vanderbilt over control of the Erie Railroad. The two multimillionaires sparred in the New York courts, paying corrupt judges to give them controlling interests in the valuable railway. Gould ultimately won by issuing thousands of shares of watered down stock, but he cost honest Erie Railroad investors millions in the process.

“Gould was not one of my top 10 favorite super-rich guys by a long shot,” Gordon says.

Among Gould’s other ploys was an attempt to corner the gold market in 1869. He and his associate Jim Fisk quietly bought up large amounts of gold and nearly got away with it. The U.S. government blocked the hostile bid by releasing $5 million of gold from the Treasury, which triggered a gold panic known as Black Friday. Again, hordes of regular investors were ruined, while Gould—tipped off to the government’s plans—walked away with millions.

When Gould died of tuberculosis in 1892, his fortune was estimated at roughly $72 million to $77 million and was left almost entirely to his family. Some sources estimate that Gould’s true wealth may have been substantially higher, with estimates reaching as much as $175 million, though such figures are difficult to verify.

Born into humble beginnings in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie emigrated with his family to Pittsburgh when he was 12 years old. Young Andrew went to work as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory and spent his free time reading books borrowed from the private library of Colonel James Anderson. Industrious and brilliant, Carnegie quickly ascended through the ranks of telegraph companies and railroads, learning how to invest his growing income along the way.

Carnegie always had his eye on the next big opportunity. When railroads needed more bridges, he moved into bridge-building. When bridge builders needed more iron, he invested in iron production. But it was the rising demand for steel—a stronger and more versatile material than wrought iron—that led Carnegie to build his first large steel mill near Pittsburgh in the early 1870s. It marked the beginning of a steel empire that would reshape the modern world.

Before Carnegie entered the steel business, the United States produced only a tiny fraction of the world’s steel, much of it imported from Britain. Three decades later, the nation had become the world’s leading steel producer, and the Carnegie Steel Company was its largest manufacturer.

With his rags-to-riches story, Carnegie claimed to be a friend of the worker, but when unionized steelworkers called a strike at Carnegie’s Homestead mill in 1892, Carnegie authorized his general manager, Henry Clay Frick, to employ all necessary measures to break the strike. Frick locked out the Homestead workers and brought in nonunion laborers protected by armed Pinkerton guards. A gunfight ensued that left 10 people dead.

“Carnegie talked a big game about a fair shake for the workers, but he was conveniently in Scotland when the Homestead strike broke out,” Gordon says. “He let Henry Clay Frick take the heat for it, but Frick didn’t do anything that Carnegie didn’t approve of.”

The Homestead Strike briefly sullied Carnegie’s reputation, but the steel magnate restored his public image through an unprecedented commitment to philanthropy. Saying, “the man who dies rich, dies disgraced,” Carnegie gave away approximately $350 million of his fortune. Inspired by the generosity of Colonel Anderson, Carnegie funded the construction of more than 2,800 public libraries around the world.

John D. Rockefeller, co-founder of the Standard Oil Company, became America’s first billionaire and the richest man in American history until Elon Musk took the title in 2026.

Rockefeller entered the oil business in the 1860s, when oil prices were volatile and American oil refineries were dangerous, ramshackle operations. Together with his brother William and partners Samuel Andrews and Henry Flagler, Rockefeller built state-of-the-art refineries in Cleveland and bought dozens more. In 1870, Rockefeller and his partners incorporated Standard Oil. Within a decade, the hungry new company controlled roughly 80 percent to 90 percent of U.S. oil refining capacity.

Standard Oil grew so quickly by swallowing up the competition. Rockefeller engineered these buyouts by signing secret deals with the railroads. As the biggest oil producer, Standard Oil could demand rebates from the railroads while ordering them to charge exorbitant rates to Standard Oil’s competitors. Most oil companies had no choice but to accept Rockefeller’s buyout offers, which Gordon says were generous and often included Standard Oil stock.

In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was an illegal monopoly and ordered that the company be broken up into more than 30 new entities. Rockefeller didn’t suffer. As a major shareholder in those new companies, he ended up twice as rich as before the decision. But the breakup of Standard Oil signaled an end to the unregulated business environment that minted so many Gilded Age millionaires while creating vast income inequality in the U.S.

“All of those people like Carnegie and Rockefeller, they...often showed what laws needed to be passed,” says Gordon, citing the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Wagner Labor Act. “We had to invent the rules after the game was already being played.”

By the time Rockefeller died in 1937 at 97 years old, he had given away almost half a billion dollars, but he was still by far the richest man America had ever seen.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of the automobile—both economically and culturally—on the United States and the world, and no individual played a larger role in making automobiles accessible to the masses than Henry Ford.

“Before Henry Ford, automobiles were rich men’s toys,” Gordon says. “The first automobile race in this country was known as the Vanderbilt Cup. But Ford wanted to make automobiles affordable.”

Ford built his first car in 1903, but his greatest innovation was the standardization and mass-production of automobiles on massive assembly lines. When Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, it sold for $850, already far less expensive than many competing vehicles. By the 1920s, improvements in manufacturing efficiency had reduced the price of a new Model T to as little as $265.

Once people could afford cars, the effects rippled throughout the economy, says Gordon. “It lowered prices for nearly everything, because consumers were no longer stuck going to the local mercantile," he explains. "With the automobile, you could go to the next town, so prices came down because it made competition possible.”

By the 1920s, cars were using 20 percent of the steel produced in the United States, 80 percent of its rubber and 75 percent of its plate glass. The auto industry became an economic engine unlike any the nation had seen before and inspired other manufacturers to adopt Ford’s mass-production techniques.

Ford was one of the richest and most influential businessmen in American history, but his legacy is marred by his virulent and very public antisemitism later in life. Ford published a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which ran a series of antisemitic articles later collected in book form as The International Jew: The World’s Problem. In 1938, he became the first American to receive the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a decoration bestowed by Nazi Germany.