[Music] cornelius vanderbilt has been described as an illiterate brute with a short temper who was hated or feared by most people he met and yet he's also one of the wealthiest men in history an incredibly shrewd and cunning business magnate who was once the richest man in the world in fact when he died he reportedly had more money than was held in the entire us treasury at the time you see before there was rockefeller or henry ford there was cornelius vanderbilt who's been dubbed the original robber baron the term for successful industrialists who amassed giant
fortunes through extremely ruthless business practices but it's hard to deny that cornelius is one of the greatest rags to riches stories there ever was cornelius's ancestors had originally come to america as servants so cornelis's rise from nothing to unimaginable wealth and power is truly fascinating let's now travel back in time to the early 1800s and see where it all began [Music] at the age of just 11 years old cornelius dropped out of school and went to work on his father's ferry in new york harbor which transported goods across the river after learning the trade cornelius
wanted to start his own business doing the same kind of thing which meant he needed a boat his mother was a farmer and while she didn't have a lot of money she had some savings which she agreed to loan to her son 100 to be exact which would be enough for him to buy his own small sailboats there was one caveat though in order for cornelius to get the loan from his mum he had to clear an extremely rocky field so that she could farm it cornelius had always had an extremely strong work ethic and
so he immediately agreed but it soon became clear removing so many rocks from the field was gonna take too long so he managed to convince other local kids to help him with the job and in return he promised they'd get free rides on his new boats together they cleared the field so his mum gave him the hundred dollar loan and cornelius bought his first boat at the age of just 16. cornelius then began transporting both freight and passengers between staten island and manhattan of course there was plenty of competition from other ship owners doing the
same thing but vanderbilt's strategy was to undercut everyone else and offer the cheapest fares on the markets he quickly gained a reputation for his reliable and affordable ferry services and here's the crucial bet after repaying back his mother for the loan he reinvested all the profits he made back into the business this meant he soon was able to buy another ship and then another ship and then another ship this is basically the capitalist blueprint for success it's really not that different to how jeff bezos built amazon you initially live frugally yourself and reinvest all the
business profits straight back into more growth and do this over and over again to build your empire and because cornelius worked so relentlessly hard it wasn't long before he had a whole fleet of ships transporting both people and goods across a variety of different routes people even started nicknaming him the commodore but then cornelius got an even bigger breakthrough with the war of 1812 between the united states and great britain when the american government gave him a lucrative contract to help transport soldiers on his ships somehow though despite working such long hours at the age
of 19 cornelius found time to marry his cousin and later went on to have 13 children with her although he wouldn't find time to be a good husband or father there are many reports of corniness neglecting them and having a very unhappy family life in fact at one point he even had his wife briefly committed to an insane asylum and a few years later he committed one of his sons to an insane asylum as well simply because he was having epileptic fits which cornelius saw as a sign of weakness and mental derangement but back on
the business side of things trade was booming and by the late 1820s cornelius had identified how to step his business up to another level steamboats he knew the steamboat technology was much more efficient than the ships he'd been using and so he began investing heavily into buying steamboats instead and once again he used the same tactics that he had with his sailboats initially undercutting every single competitor so that he had the cheaper prices and they stole all their customers at one point he even started offering some boat trips for free to cornelius it didn't matter
if he was making a loss on every trip because his logic was simple as long as he had more money than his competitors he could quickly bankrupt them by taking all their customers and then once they were out of business he'd raise his own prices to more sustainable levels these ruthless tactics did indeed bankrupt several other business owners but in many cases cornelius would simply buy their businesses at a reduced price once the ship owners realized they couldn't compete with cornelius's pricing there were also a few larger steamboat companies who simply paid cornelius a lump
sum of money to leave the area and not compete on the same trade routes for example when cornelius started operating on the hudson river a company called the steamboat association who also operated there paid him a hundred thousand dollars to stop operating his ships in their territory for them it was cheaper to pay cornelius off than try to compete with his low prices of course every time cornelius got a big payout like this or he bought out a competitor at a discounted rate his own fleet just got bigger and thus his power and wealth increased
further to cornelius making money was a game and he was determined to win however even as cornelius wealth grew he would always be considered an outsider by the wealthy elites his lack of school education didn't help there either as cornelius struggled to write properly and the way he looked and spoke was certainly not how most of the upper class looked and spoke but cornelius used his working-class beginnings to his advantage he advertised his ships as the people's line affordable ships for normal everyday people but cornelius was never content with what he had and in 1949
cornelius identified his next big money maker the california gold rush now you may have heard the stat that the people who got the richest during the gold rush were often the people selling the pickaxes not the people actually looking for gold because there were so many people doing that but if you want to know who got the richest of all from the gold rush it was the ones transporting people to get there you see after gold was discovered in california literally hundreds of thousands of people were traveling there hoping to get rich the largest mass
migration in american history but california wasn't yet linked to the rest of the country by rail and cornelius wanted to cash in on this so he immediately began offering boat trips to california of course several other people did this too but where cornelius differentiated himself is that he found a new route to california via nicaragua which was about 600 miles shorter than the route via panama everyone else was using he agreed an exclusive deal with the government of nicaragua and as a result cornelis's trips were faster and cheaper than the competition and thus he attracted
far more customers as more and more people flocked to the gold rush it was cornelius who was cashing in on every single trip but in 1853 corny listed something that he'd basically never done before he took a vacation he was about to turn 60 years old and had been working pretty much non-stop ever since he was a kid so he decided to finally have a proper break and brought a gigantic yacht to conor tour of europe with his family and immediately everything went wrong he'd left management of his new transport business in nicaragua to two
men called morgan and garrison who were partners in the business but they ended up betraying him and making a shady deal with the new president of nicaragua a man named william walker who'd forcefully taken charge of the country the deal basically meant cornelius's exclusive rights to operate his ships throughout the country would instead be given to just morgan and garrison instead when cornelius found out he sent them one of the shortest and most ominous letters ever gentlemen you have undertaken to cheat me i won't sue you for the law is too slow i'll ruin you
yours truly cornelius vanderbilt's and that's exactly what he did cornelius immediately set up another transit company nearby and used his classic trick of offering ridiculously low prices to steal customers he then refused to transport passengers to or from nicaragua to create a blockade of the country he also convinced the nearby countries to not recognize walker's new government and eventually he helped start a war to completely overthrow the new government in nicaragua basically as cornelius had stated in his letter he had completely ruined those who would cross them but before we get to the next part
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of 60 they're looking to retire and wind down for a more relaxed life but not cornelius he was about to monopolize an entirely different industry but before that let's quickly go back to his personal life because in 1868 cornelius's wife died the one he briefly sent to an insane asylum and then just one year later cornelius married a different woman called frank armstrong crawford and yes i double checked that wasn't a mistake his wife's name was indeed frank this was supposedly because frank's parents had agreed to name their child after their best friend and they'd
obviously just assumed they were having a boy but when they had a girl they still stuck with the name frank anyway as agreed so anyway cornelius married frank who was more than 40 years younger than him and as if that wasn't weird enough this woman called frank who was 40 years younger than cornelius was another one of his cousins i'm not joking cornelius's first marriage was to his cousin sophia but with her dead a year later he was now marrying another of his cousins called frank and look i know marrying your cousin was more common
back then but still the guy's been all over the world yet both his wives or his cousins so cornelius's personal life was still as weird as ever but business-wise he was really just getting started you see cornelius was always looking to the future and just like he previously identified steamboats as the next revolutionary technology now he was looking at railroads he realized more and more shipments were happening not by boats but by train and so if he wanted to continue to dominate transportation that's where he needed to focus so cornelius began selling off his fleet
of ships and instead began investing in railroads now until cornelius got involved in the railroad business there was a huge amount of different railway services that were independently owned but cornelius started connecting railroads between different regions and building an interconnected network he wanted to consolidate all these different railways into one giant railroad empire and by doing this he began to build a monopoly in railroad transportation of course as always cornelius reinvested most of the profits to buy even more railroads and expand even faster before long he'd built the largest railroad in the world now in
his final years of life cornelius did start diverting some of his huge wealth towards philanthropy for example he established the vanderbilt university for a million dollars which at the time was the largest charitable gift in american history but around this time cornelius grew increasingly ill and became bedridden despite his weakened state he was still his usual fiery aggressive self for example when he saw members of the media outside his house to report on his illness he had to be physically restrained after going outside to attack them but after many months of fighting his illness cornelius
died in 1877 aged 82 the new york times announced his death stating the immediate cause of his death was exhaustion brought on by long suffering from a complication of chronic disorders at the time of his death his fortune was worth around 100 million dollars but adjusting for inflation that today would have been around 200 billion dollars it's estimated that on paper he had around 1 9 of all the american currency in circulation at the time and yet despite that he lived a relatively modest life he consistently plowed almost all his income and his time into
the business when he died around 90 of his fortune went to his oldest and favorite son and then he spit the rest between his other many children most of which he viewed as weak and undeserving cornelius vanderbilt was clearly a polarizing figure hated by many but normally with a grudging respect even his enemies would have to admit that he drastically improved and expanded transportation first through sailboats then steamboats and eventually railroads and in the process he'd helped connect different parts of the country together allowing for much easier transport of both people and goods and an
affordable price in many ways he shaped the american economy more than any other entrepreneur had before him and it's quite amazing that he turned that initial 100 loan from his mom into a fortune that very few other people in history would ever match however if you want to find out the historical person who was even richer than cornelius just click this video right here trust me this one is a really wild ride i'll hopefully see you there cheers [Music]
