4. Born into an impoverished Scottish family, Andrew Carnegie rose to become the wealthiest man in America with an equivalent net worth of $375 billion.
Andrew Carnegie (b. 1835) was a Scottish-American industrialist and business magnate, remembered in particular for leading the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, into a working-class weaving family, at the age of thirteen Carnegie emigrated to the United States with his parents out of desperation due to starvation and economic depression. Joining his father at work in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the pair worked twelve hours per day, six days per week, earning less than two dollars per week each. Employed as a telegraph operator by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company in 1853, Carnegie’s rapid rise soon followed.
Becoming superintendent of the Western Division by 1858, Carnegie invested nearly all of his earnings into the booming railways, in so doing multiplying his stake many times over. By the 1860s, Carnegie had earned enough through smart speculative investments, including in oil farms, to enter the ironworks industry. His greatest accomplishment, in 1892 Carnegie founded his eponymous steel company, selling it just nine years later for over three hundred million dollars. Donating vast sums to charity, founding thousands of local libraries, Carnegie’s peak wealth, during which time he was briefly the wealthiest man in America, reached the equivalent of $375,000,000,000.