Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J. Gold and J.P.
Morgan were all in their late 20s or early 30s,
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 20th century.
They were quite different people.
Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Gold 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 reigning 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,