Researching this discussion, I found the hardest part was picking two people. All the stories I found are so interesting, Steve Jobs, Sir Richard Branson, Larry Page, just to name a few. Who I settled on is Andrew Carnegie. He grew up a poor Handloom weaver’s son in Scotland. In 1848 his father borrowed money to get his family to America for a better life. Andrew was 12, and soon got a job in a cotton factory as a bobbin boy for $1.20 a week. Andrew eventually got a job as a telegraph operator and soon became the fastest, best operator in the Pittsburgh area. That is how he got his first railroad job for Tom Scott, the superintendent for the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. He absorbed as much knowledge as he could and eventually succeeded his boss as superintendent and started investing in companies such as coal, iron oil, and manufacturing railroad sleeper cars. He left Pennsylvania Railroad in 1865 and in 1870 founded his first steel company near Pittsburgh and created a steel empire over the next decade. In 1901, banker John Pierpont Morgan bought Carnegie Steel for $480 million, which translates to $13.6 billion, Making Carnegie One of the world’s richest men. What stands out to me about Andrew Carnegie is that he gave about $350 million to charities and philanthropic activities such as funding 2,500 public library’s around the globe and donating about 7,600 organs to various churches, not to mention donating the $1.1 million that was needed for land and construction costs for Carnegie Hall in New York City (Staff, 2009).
The second person I decided on was John D. Rockefeller. John grew up the second of six children, his mother a homemaker, his father a con man, or traveling salesman of elixirs. As a child John earned money selling turkeys, candy doing odd jobs for neighbors, even loaning small amounts of money to neighbors. In 1855 at the age of 16, John got a job as an office clerk for a commission firm that bought, sold, and shipped grain, coal and other commodities. In 1859, John and a partner established their own commission firm and in 1863 John and several partners entered the oil business by investing in a Cleveland refinery. In 1865 John borrowed money to buy his partners out. Over the next few years he acquired other partners, and started buying up more refineries and eventually his own ships and tanker cars in order to transport his oil and kerosene He named his company Standard Oil and was buying any and all rival companies, eventually forming the Standard Oil Trust which by 1880 controlled a staggering 90% of all refinery operations in the United States. Standard Oil did everything from build its own barrels to hiring top scientists to find
