Overview: Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world's richest man by creating America's most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America. Rockefeller was likely the most controversial businessman in our nation's history....

Born of modest origins in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel.... Carnegie, the son of an impoverished linen weaver, moved to Pittsburgh at the age of thirteen. The embodiment of the American dream, he pulled himself up from bobbin boy in a cotton factory to become the richest man in the world. He spent the rest of his life giving away the fortune he had accumulated and crusading for international peace....

At 28 years old, Scott Harrison had it all. A top nightclub promoter in New York City, his life was an endless cycle of drugs, booze, and models. But 10 years in, desperately unhappy and morally bankrupt, he asked himself, "What would the exact opposite of my life look like?" Walking away from everything, Harrison spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa and discovered his true calling. In 2006, with no money and less than no experience,...

"From the finance editor of The New York Times, an examination of Bill Gates-one of the most powerful, fascinating, and contradictory figures of the past four decades-and an eye-opening exploration of our national fixation on billionaires"-- "From the finance editor of The New York Times, an examination of Bill Gates-one of the most powerful, fascinating, and contradictory figures of the past four decades-and an eye-opening exploration of our national...

Chronicles the rags-to-riches tale of a Scottish immigrant who used most of the millions he earned as a steel tycoon to set up a fund for the advancement of science, education, and peace.