In 1901, Andrew Carnegie sold his steel empire for $480 million — the largest business transaction the world had ever seen. It was the kind of moment most biographies linger on. But for Carnegie, the sale was almost incidental. The real story — the one that still matters today — is what he believed wealth was for.
Carnegie grew up far from the world of steel mills and capital markets. Born into poverty in Scotland and raised in a cramped home in Pennsylvania, he began his career as a telegraph clerk earning $2.50 a week. From these beginnings he built a company that reshaped American industry. Yet he never viewed the accumulation of wealth as the final goal. Wealth, in his mind, was a stewardship — a temporary responsibility entrusted to those who could use it for the broader good.
His philosophy, crystallised in his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth, sits at the heart of why Carnegie remains such a compelling figure for modern investors. He argued that wealth should never be hoarded, nor distributed indiscriminately, but deployed purposefully: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” For Carnegie, the true measure of success wasn’t the size of his fortune, but the clarity of the mission behind it.