20 Famous Tycoons Whose Real Stories Aren’t What You Think

Henry Ford established Ford Motor Company in 1903 and introduced the Model T in 1908; however, it was German engineer Karl Benz who originally invented the car in 1886. Ford’s innovation was the introduction of the moving assembly line at Ford’s plant in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1913. He reduced the amount of time it took to assemble a chassis from more than 12 hours to just 93 minutes. In 1914, he doubled pay to $5 a day, after turnover had topped 300% the year before. So the famous raise wasn’t just generosity: that pay increase solved a workforce problem and was also meant to head off unionization.

John D. Rockefeller co-founded Standard Oil in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1870. He built his company with covert rebates from the railroads and acquisitions of competitors; by the end of the 1880s, he had captured roughly 90% of all U.S. oil refining. In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, under the Sherman Antitrust Act, that Standard Oil must be divided up into 34 companies. You might expect that to have hurt Rockefeller’s fortune, but the shares of its successor companies (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron) multiplied in value. By 1916, Rockefeller was the first verified U.S. billionaire.

After an early studio in Kansas City closed, Walt Disney and his brother Roy (his business partner) opened Disney Brothers Studio in Los Angeles in 1923. Mickey Mouse first appeared in the early cartoon with synchronized sound, Steamboat Willie (1928). The artist who originally drew Mickey was Ub Iwerks, Disney’s leading artist, although the character was conceived and voiced by Walt Disney himself.

After failing at other candy businesses, Milton Hershey established the Lancaster Caramel Company in Pennsylvania. After seeing German chocolate-making machinery at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, he started the Hershey Chocolate Company in 1894 as a subsidiary of the Lancaster Caramel Company. He sold the caramel company for $1 million in 1900 to concentrate on the chocolate business. Although Swiss confectioners had invented milk chocolate, Hershey figured out how to make it in bulk.

In 1895, traveling salesman King Camp Gillette drew a sketch of a thin disposable double-edged razor blade. Gillette enlisted engineer William Nickerson to devise a way to stamp out the blades in steel. Nickerson’s process was patented in 1904, and Gillette placed his own face on the packaging. Resharpenable safety razors were already available. Gillette’s genius was in the pricing: sell the handle cheap, make your money forevermore on the blades. The razor was practically an invitation to keep buying from him. World War One was a boon; American soldiers were issued 3.5 million razors and 36 million blades.

William Randolph Hearst inherited the San Francisco Examiner from his father in 1887 and purchased the New York Journal in 1895. He used yellow journalism, sensationalized newspaper reporting designed to attract readers, to compete against rival newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and his chain grew to nearly 30 daily papers by the 1920s. A legend has it that Hearst wired artist Frederic Remington to “furnish the war,” but the story was not mentioned until a 1901 memoir, and there is no record of a telegram being sent, so it is probably apocryphal.

In 1848, Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie arrived in America and started out as a factory bobbin boy before making his fortune building Carnegie Steel, which used the Bessemer process, a cheap way to mass-produce steel. During the 1892 Homestead Strike, a violent labor dispute at Carnegie’s steel plant in Pennsylvania, Carnegie was back in Scotland while his manager, Henry Clay Frick, faced down the striking workers. Though Carnegie privately supported Frick’s hard line, he stayed out of the spotlight. Carnegie sold his steel empire to financier J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million and built 2,509 public libraries with his fortune.

Asa Candler, an Atlanta pharmacist, purchased the rights to John Pemberton’s original Coca-Cola syrup formula for around $2,300 between 1888 and 1891. Candler incorporated The Coca-Cola Company in 1892 and increased brand awareness through the use of free-drink coupons and by branding soda fountain clocks. In 1899, he sold national rights to bottlers for $1 and kept the more lucrative syrup production business. Yes, $1. In 1919, his family sold the company for $25 million.

Madam C.J. Walker, whose real name was Sarah Breedlove, was born in 1867 to former slaves in Louisiana. She became a washerwoman before formulating hair care products for Black women. She took the name Madam C.J. Walker in 1906. At the Indianapolis headquarters, constructed in 1910, she trained more than 20,000 salespeople who sold products door-to-door throughout the Jim Crow South and elsewhere, during an era of legally enforced racial segregation. Walker has been called America’s first self-made female millionaire; her estate was worth between $600,000 and $1 million when she died in 1919.

In 1891, William Wrigley Jr. came to Chicago to sell soap, and he gave out some free baking powder with his sales pitch. But when the baking powder sold faster than the soap, he switched over and began giving out chewing gum instead. It sold even faster. At that point, the freebie was doing a better job than the actual product. He started Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint in 1893, and by 1919, he was mailing free gum to more than 7 million homes.

In 1784, John Jacob Astor arrived in New York as a German immigrant. He set up a fur business that became so lucrative that he started the American Fur Company in 1808, which traded between the Great Lakes and China. Seeing the potential of New York City in the 1830s, Astor dumped his fur business and used the proceeds to buy land in Manhattan, becoming known as “New York’s Landlord.” When he died in 1848, he left behind some $20 million, equivalent to about 0.9 percent of U.S. GDP. It made him America’s first multimillionaire. And unlike his great-grandson John Jacob Astor IV, he wasn’t the one who died on the Titanic.

Marshall Field transformed Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company into the modern department store. Haggling over prices gave way to fixed marked prices, credit was extended, and there were no-questions-asked return policies. The company introduced personal shoppers and even the first department-store tea room. Under the motto “Give the lady what she wants,” Marshall Field rebuilt the business after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, opening a larger and grander flagship on State Street in 1892. In 2006, after being acquired by Macy’s parent company, Marshall Field’s was renamed Macy’s.

In 1869, Henry Heinz began selling grated horseradish from Pennsylvania in clear glass bottles rather than the usual dark-colored glass to demonstrate the purity of his food, since food purity was not always guaranteed back then. In 1876, he launched Heinz Tomato Ketchup. In 1896, after viewing a shoe advertisement that boasted “21 styles,” Heinz chose “57 Varieties” for his company’s brand because it just sounded good, even though he was marketing more than 60 products at the time. So no, there weren’t actually 57 varieties. He just liked the number.

In 1879, retailer F. W. Woolworth opened his first five-and-dime in Utica, New York, but it closed after three months. He moved his operations to Lancaster, Pa., where he found success by allowing shoppers to examine low-priced wares on open display trays rather than request items from a store clerk standing behind the sales counter. In 1913, Woolworth finished Manhattan’s Woolworth Building, a soaring 792-foot skyscraper, paying the $13.5 million construction cost entirely in cash. All $13.5 million of it. Woolworth died in 1919 with more than 1,000 chain locations; his empire was based on buying merchandise in large quantities directly from suppliers.

At 16, Cornelius Vanderbilt opened a ferry service in New York Harbor in 1810. That ferry business was eventually expanded into a steamship empire, which made Vanderbilt known as “The Commodore.” In the 1860s, he sold his steamships and unified several local rail lines into one, connecting New York City to Chicago via the Hudson River Railroad and New York Central. Vanderbilt constructed the original Grand Central Depot in Manhattan in 1871; he passed away in 1877, leaving behind an estate valued at more than $100 million.

In 1886, Richard Sears, a Minnesota railroad station agent, began selling pocket watches by mail. In 1893, after moving to Chicago, he joined forces with watchmaker Alvah Roebuck to create Sears, Roebuck and Co. Their mail-order “Wish Book” catalog shipped tools, clothing, and even prefabricated kit houses, which buyers could assemble themselves, directly to farm families across the country, without going through a local retailer. Julius Rosenwald joined the partnership in 1895. He oversaw the massive warehousing operations that made it all possible. The company wouldn’t open its first retail stores until 1925.

George Westinghouse received a patent for his railway air brake in 1869, at age 22. The device allowed engineers to safely bring trains to a halt using compressed air. In 1886, Westinghouse established the Westinghouse Electric Company to promote alternating current, or AC, electricity. He also purchased the patents for Nikola Tesla’s AC motor and transformer in 1888. His competitor, Thomas Edison, championed direct-current, or DC, electricity instead. But Westinghouse triumphed in the “War of the Currents,” the fight over which electrical system would become the standard, after successfully wiring the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and constructing the 1896 hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls.

J.P. Morgan was the head of J.P. Morgan & Co., the leading American investment bank of the time; the company took failing railroads and reorganized them into stable operations, a process called “Morganization.” Yes, they really named the process after him. In 1892, he orchestrated the merger creating General Electric. In 1901, he purchased Carnegie Steel from Andrew Carnegie for $480 million; this company was incorporated as United States Steel Corp., becoming the first company in history valued at over $1 billion. In 1907, he arranged a private financial rescue during a major financial panic, an action that Congress later cited when creating the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

David Sarnoff came to New York from Russia in 1900 and began working at Marconi Wireless. In 1916, he wrote a memo in which he proposed a household ‘Radio Music Box’. In 1926, he founded NBC, a subsidiary of RCA, which became America’s first commercial radio network. Sarnoff became president of RCA in 1930. Publicity later suggested that during the Titanic’s sinking in 1912, he had kept vigil on the distress signals for 72 consecutive hours. Other East Coast stations relayed those signals, too. The solo-hero version is mere embellishment.

Thomas Edison opened a research lab in Menlo Park, N.J., in 1876 and went on to receive 1,093 U.S. patents. Edison didn’t create the first light bulb, but he made one that could be used commercially. In 1882, he created the Pearl Street Station in Manhattan, which became the heart of an early commercial electric power system. In 1889, Edison created Edison General Electric, which, three years later, J.P. Morgan bought out and merged with another company to become General Electric. The word “Edison” was dropped from the sign.

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