Cornelius Vanderbilt

Cornelius Vanderbilt started with $100 borrowed from his mother at age 16, running a small ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan. By the time he died in 1877 at 82, he had accumulated a fortune of approximately $100 million — equivalent to roughly 1.5 percent of the entire U.S. GDP at the time, a concentration of wealth that no American has matched since in relative terms. He achieved it not through invention but through an almost predatory genius for identifying transportation bottlenecks, acquiring control of them, and rationalizing what he controlled into something faster, cheaper, and more profitable than what had existed before.

Vanderbilt's first fortune came in steamships, where he undercut established operators until they paid him to vacate the route — a tactic so brazen that competitors essentially paid him protection. His second and larger fortune came in railroads, where he consolidated competing New York lines into the New York Central, created the first through-route between New York and Chicago, and built Grand Central Depot as a monument to what private capital at full confidence looks like. The network he assembled carried a commanding share of the nation's commerce for decades.

Vanderbilt had little patience for philanthropy or the social obligations that later robber barons at least performed publicly. He gave $1 million to found Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1873 — reportedly because a Methodist bishop spent three hours working on him — and otherwise concentrated his energy on accumulation with a purity of focus that contemporaries found both admirable and alarming. When asked about the law, he reportedly said: "Law! What do I care about the law? Hain't I got the power?" It was the unguarded motto of an entire era.