John D. Rockefeller

John Davison Rockefeller (8 July 1839 – 23 May 1937) founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870 and became the dominant figure of the American petroleum industry before turning to large-scale philanthropy. He was an operator and owner, not a market speculator — his fortune came from refining, pipelines and consolidation, and his own memoir, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909), is a book about building businesses rather than trading panics. He did, though, make one famous buy-the-panic statement: during the October 1929 crash he announced that he and his son had been purchasing sound common stocks. That single real episode is the nearest thing in his life to the sentiment of this proverb — and a plausible reason a Rothschild saying drifted onto his name.