#437 The Tycoons: Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould & Morgan

Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gold, and JPMorgan were all in their late twenties or early thirties, all on the first rungs of their careers in the waning days of the civil war. In an age of outsized business leaders, no others played so great a role in shaping and channeling the American boom. They forced the pace, drove the transition to ever larger scales, and imposed personal stamps on the national economy that persisted well into the twentieth century. They were quite different people. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Gould tapped into the national predilection for speed, the obsession with moving ahead, the tolerance for experimenting to create one of history's purest laboratories of creative destruction. Most businessmen of the time believed in orderly markets and gentlemanly fair profits, but these three came with flaming swords. That's a great line. Morgan was the regulator, always on the side of reining in what he called ruinous competition, most especially of the kind regularly unleashed by the other three. The American steel industry was settling into a comfortable cartel when Carnegie commenced his career of disruption. Carnegie's plants were always the biggest, the most automated, the most focused on pushing prices down. He had the simplest of business mantras: cut costs, take share, gain scale. Profits would take care of themselves. Jay Gold was a provocateur, a master of public security markets as no one before him and few since, always attacking, always pushing the possible to precarious new heights. Gold s arena was railroads and the telegraph, the critical infrastructure of his period. Rockefeller may have been the greatest visionary and the supreme manager. He took over world oil markets so quickly that it was over before most people noticed. He taught the world its first lesson in the power of large scale distribution. These four are the founding fathers of the American industrial superpower. That was an excerpt from the preface of the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is The Tycoons, How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gold, and JP Morgan invented the American super economy. And this book was written by Charles R. Morris. So originally, when I picked up this book, I thought I was going to read a biography about four tycoons. What the book is really about is using the life and career of these four tycoons to explain this massive expansion and growth in the American economy that occurred after the civil war. And the author makes the case that these four tycoons played a role in building out the economy on which all modern businesses actually rest. And so I wanna... He has a few good quotes here right before Lincoln dies, and it really sets up the difference between... When I think about like where the story is, like, the difference between like almost like a startup and like an incumbent. America at the time was obviously younger, hungrier, way less money than most of Europe. And …