J. P. Morgan

John Pierpont Morgan was the most powerful private banker of America’s Gilded Age — the man who assembled General Electric and U.S. Steel and twice helped shore up the federal government’s finances. He was also a conspicuous yachtsman, running a succession of steam yachts named Corsair, which is why so many Gilded Age anecdotes about rich men and price tags eventually drifted onto him. His biographer Jean Strouse is blunt about the mismatch between the man and the maxim: Morgan was, she wrote, “a singularly inarticulate, unreflective man, not likely to come up with a maxim worthy of Oscar Wilde.”