Billionaire

“ Offices of Grand’s are occupied by companies which deal in mutual funds—giant and fantastic corporations whose policies define the shape of nations.
August Guy Grand himself was a billionaire. He10 had 180 millions cash deposit in New York banks, and this ready capital was of course but a part of his gross holdings.
In the beginning, Grand’s associates, wealthy men themselves, saw nothing extraordinary about him; a reticent man of simple tastes, they thought, a man who had inherited most of his money and had preserved it through large safe investments in steel, rubber, and oil. ”

“ Among the hundreds of billionaires and megabillionaires in the U.S., there are more than several enlightened persons upset by the problems our society faces who could make serious improvements possible. ”

“ She has raised the nine millions left her by her father and nine millions left her by her aunt to thirty millions. She is a woman of great ability and courage. She once took with her five millions of dollars of securities in a satchel on a street car to deposit with her banker on Wall street.
The probabilities are that billionaires will be as plentiful in the twentieth century as millionaires are to-day, through hard work, self-denial, rigid economy, method, accuracy, and strict temperance, for not one of the self-made millionaires are intemperate. ”

“ During these years that I have been trotting about the globe he has been climbing higher and higher, until now his legs are dangling from the topmost round. Why, I understand that none but the solidest billionaires and the fattest monopolies presume to retain him. ”

“ We can either keep taxes exactly as they are for millionaires and billionaires, or we can ask them to pay at least the same rate as a plumber or a bus driver. And in the process, we can put teachers and construction workers and veterans back on the job. We can either fight to protect their tax cuts, or we can cut taxes for virtually every worker and small business in America. ”

“ That is why I decline to recognize the mere multi-millionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him of real benefit, of real use,—and such is often the case,—why, then he does become an asset of worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. ”

“ I make their dreams live in my paper. It's everything to them, melodrama, society, romance; it's a peep-hole into the worlds they can't touch. I show 'em millionaires moving behind their [Pg 172] house-walls, rolling in wealth, fighting one another, battling for one another's wives, flinging a billion against a billion, ruining thousands for a whim. 'Monte Cristo'? It's tame to what I serve 'em. 'Mr. X Gives a Hundred Thousand Dollar Lunch'—'Secret Drama of Oil Trust's Home'—'Deserts Millionaire Husband for Chauffeur'—'Ten Millions in Five Years'! That's life—that's emotion! ”

“ I have preferred to have this inspired employer a millionaire, because the more capital he has the more men he can employ, and the more rapidly the other kind of millionaire, the blind, old-fashioned butter of Labour, will be driven out of business. ”

“ No less than three Americans tell us that a millionaire, Carnegie, of Pittsburg, says that his class ought to invest their millions for the public good during life, and above all things not to leave wealth to their children. ”

“ Inasmuch as the dollar might have been turned into capital and given to a laborer who, while earning it, would have reproduced it, it must be regarded as taken from the latter. When a millionnaire gives a dollar to a beggar the gain of utility to the beggar is enormous, and the loss of utility to the millionaire is insignificant. Generally the discussion is allowed to rest there. But if the millionaire makes capital of the dollar, it must go upon the labor market, as a demand for productive services. ”

“ Finance-capital and the banks make this superiority of the biggest enterprises, as we shall see, still more crushing, in the most literal sense of the word, since millions of employers, small, average, and even great are in reality attached completely to some hundreds of millionaire financiers. ”

“ And some who have been reckoned poor will be found to be the shrewdest of investors. They will be the millionaires of the Kingdom time and in the homeland. I do not mean dollar-millionaires, but life-millionaires. The standard of wealth in the homeland is lives, not dollars.
And some too there will be, and not few in numbers, who have given of their strength in business pursuits to the making of money, as the Spirit has guided them, or to whom it has been left in trust by others, and who have been steadily investing the wealth that has come in the lives of men. ”

“ It suddenly dawned on her—the whole system of "finance." In one swift second a thousand disconnected facts merged into a complete, repulsive whole. So, this was where these enormous fortunes came from! The big fellows inveigled the public into enterprises by promises of equal shares; then they juggled accounts, stole most of the profits, saddled all the losses on the investors. And she had admired the daring of these great financiers! Why, who wouldn't be daring, with no conscience, no honor, and a free hand to gamble with other people's money, without risking a penny of his own! ”

“ No, labor consumes all of the total product that its wages will buy back.
"Two billions are left to capital. After it has paid its expenses, does it consume the remainder? Does capital consume all of its two billions?" ”

“ The New York World Almanac gives a list of sixteen of these families of vast wealth, tracing the descent of their children and grandchildren with scrupulous care, as if for an Almanach de Gotha. I suppose that another list might be made twice as large,—three or four times as large,—who knows how large,—of people whose fortune runs up into the tens of millions. [Pg 143]
These men have a vast power in American finance and industry, not only by the personal possession of money, but also through the control of the great trusts, railroads, banks, in which they have invested it. ”

“ The moment ninety million people in a great nation have welded out a vision of the kind of man of wealth—the kind of employer they want, the moment they set the millionaire in the vise of some great national expectation, carve upon him firmly, implacably the will of the people, the people will have the millionaire they want. ”

“ You are the great financier, merger, and magnate. Do you mind a few statistics?
{Starkweather}
Go ahead.
{Knox}
You exercise a controlling interest in nine billion dollars' worth of railways; in two billion dollars' worth of industrial concerns; in one billion dollars' worth of life insurance groups; in one billion dollars' worth of banking groups; in two billion dollars' worth of trust companies. Mind you, I do not say you own all this, but that you exercise a controlling interest. That is all that is necessary. ”

“ You’ve no idea of the money engaged in productive industry, money earned by hard years of labor and economy, money held in trust for widows and orphans, money stolen from banks and corporations, money abstracted by clerks and office boys, is carried into Wall Street, in the vain hope of acquiring a sudden fortune, and there remains. ”

“ Each man as he took his profits wished ardently, but with a useless curiosity, that some one could tell him how, and in what amount, and through whom, the eccentric millionaire had acted, and what his profit had been. ”

“ Can a game be beaten where so many multimillionaires are created among those who are on the "inside" and where so large a percentage of the speculator's money must come out every year to pay the enormous cost of maintaining a vast system of stock-brokerage offices, stock exchanges, telegraph and telephone wires, newspapers, publicity bureaus, yachts, Fifth Avenue palaces, huge contributions to national and State political campaigns, etc.? ”

“ The descendants of the mushroom millionaires of the present generation will consolidate into a broad and almost omnipotent money power, whose sympathies and influence 246will conflict with our political institutions at every point of contact. They will exercise a vast control over the larger organizations and movements of capital; monopolies will seek protection under their wing; and, by the ascendancy which wealth always confers, they will steadily broaden their grasp upon the legislation, the banking and the commerce of the nation. ”

“ Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings became millionaires. Not one can stand beside the great financiers of steel and real estate and railroads. And not one, in his whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a Carnegie or a Rockefeller has made in a single year.
The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street meddled with the harvester business once—and never again. That was twenty-one years ago, when the famous “Binder-Twine Trust” set out with the black flag flying. ”

“ The rapidity with which large fortunes have been acquired is one of the wonders of the modern world. At the present time, the United States numbers its millionaires by thousands. The mere mention of such names as Vanderbilt, Gould, Astor, Rockefeller, Morgan, Havemeyer, Belmont, Whitney, Goelet, Carnegie, Armour, Harriman and Dupont (all of them families numbered among the multi-millionaires whose wealth was acquired, for the most part, since the Civil War) calls to mind the immense concentration of income-yielding wealth which has been going on within the past century. ”

“ Well, capital now is exactly what crags were then. Men fight fairly (we will, at least, grant so much, though it is more than we ought) for their money; but, once having got it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who passes below pay toll to his million, and build another tower of his money castle. ”

“ The real value of the total accumulations of the whole group is perhaps about $10,000,000, or $5,000 a piece. Pitiful, is it not, beside the fortunes of oil kings and steel trusts, but after all is the fortune of the millionaire the only stamp of true and successful living? ”

“ To modern society it seems the most110 natural thing in the world that money should earn interest. Nowadays, the number of those who lend or invest capital in the countless ways offered by modern finance is infinite. Every one of these big and little capitalists, who possess State bonds, shares in railways or industrials, or bank or commercial securities, would be thunderstruck if anyone told him that he was behaving in an unseemly way. ”

“ Thirty years more, and did his energies survive devastating tropical fevers, the rarely relaxing strain of organizing and guarding industries, investments, transit systems, the ever-trembling aggregations of capital called Trusts, sound a money basis as his own were built upon, all the manifold ramifications of a fortune, which, through the increased resources of the country during the past ten years, through his own and his father’s genius, and by the mere force of momentum, was now close upon a billion dollars ”

“ The Southerners of Wall Street, with but very few exceptions, entered that great field of finance with but one consolation, and that was the calm consciousness of being thoroughly protected against loss from the simple fact that they had nothing to lose. [Applause and laughter.] A hundred millions of dollars is no small pile when stacked up beside—nothing. ”

“ For Cerebral-Alimentives
¶ This combination comprises the majority of the world's millionaires, for it combines the intense alimentive desires for life's comforts with the extreme brain capacity necessary to get them. So he becomes a "magnate," a man of "big business," and tends to high finance, manufacturing and merchandizing on a world-scale. ”

“ Well, out of the five or six millions which form your real capital, you have just lost nearly two millions, which must, of course, in the same degree diminish your credit and fictitious fortune; to follow out my simile, your skin has been opened by bleeding, and this if repeated three or four times will cause death -- so pay attention to it, my dear Monsieur Danglars. Do you want money? ”

“ Eustace, “that the wealth owners are the rulers of our later civilization, but, so far as I have observed, instead of endeavoring to curb or overthrow them, we are all doing our best to join their ranks and participate in their power. You appear to be the only living millionaire who declaims against his class. ”

“ They were all men, and nearly all bankers. There were millionaires among them, poor, unhappy millionaires, who had come through the storm and snow and sleet to see a man melt a hole in a safe, and incidentally, to hear the man tell of the wondrous workings of the "Startler" alarm, which was to guard the millionaire's millions and give him a rest. ”

“ A thousand men contribute to the production of $1,000,000 of wealth, all of which is gobbled up in a few weeks or months by the scheming of a single “financier.” The board of directors of a railroad, a mining company or a manufacturing company, may issue to themselves certificates of watered stock for which [98] they pay not a cent, and which represent wealth having no existence, but which they are in a position to compel the public to make good. ”

“ For the last few centuries, commercial ability, financial capacity, knowledge of how to manipulate men and measures in a way to increase fortune, and so to secure more of what fortune will buy, have been more and more appreciated, until to-day aristocracy and royalty clip coupons, families whose ancestors trace from the Conqueror invest in stocks and draw dividends, and the bluest blooded of all great families engage with avidity in the struggle for business and wealth. ”

“ The banker, the manufacturer, the railroad-man, the contractor, plans and carries through colossal undertakings so quietly that most persons do not know of their existence. Where there were scarce a hundred men in this country a generation ago worth a million dollars apiece; now there are probably fifteen thousand whose combined wealth will average more than that per man.
Scores of railroads are gradually absorbed into a few mighty systems. And more property is owned by a few hundred corporations than by all the people in the country outside of them. ”