Andrew Carnegie - David Nasaw  ## Metadata - Author: **David Nasaw** - Full Title: Andrew Carnegie - Category: #books ## Highlights - There was risk involved in proceeding on his own, but that could be minimized, if not eliminated entirely, by following the rules of the game he had learned from his mentors: Only invest in companies you have investigated yourself; only invest in companies about which you have insider knowledge; only invest in companies that sell goods or services for which demand is growing; never invest as an individual, but always with a group of trusted associates who together will own a controlling or dominant interest in the company. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0bwzcmd0zrgmq2e847n3hk1)) - His Autobiography backs up his assertions, but only by carefully editing out a critical period in his business career. From 1866, when he returned from his yearlong tour of Europe, to 1872, when he entered the steel business, Carnegie would accumulate the fortune that was later reinvested in his steel mills by doing precisely what he would later condemn: buying and selling shares in companies whose assets he knew were worth far less than the value of their stock. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0c1gqtjckwy0dz58bty10r6)) - If ever there were a textbook case of how to wheel and deal one’s way to fortune, this was it. Carnegie created a company with no assets, added value to it by making deals with his partners Thomson and Scott, and then, after a series of negotiations and exchanges, transmogrified stock worth no more than the paper on which it was engraved into shares of Western Union that he would hold and collect dividends on for the rest of his life. This was crony capitalism at its most basic. And there were no laws on the books to stop it, no Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate it. Anyone with the money to print stock certificates and the political influence to get an act of incorporation through a state legislature could play the game. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0c23e30v3f5ppxdp0dvk4cd)) - What he does not do, either in his Autobiography or any of his other writings, is take credit for the triumph at Braddock. He did not claim that he, as an individual, had been responsible for the success of the venture. Nor, for that matter, did he believe any of his fellow millionaires had accumulated their fortunes because of their particular virtues or talents. On the contrary, as he explained in an article published in 1906 in the North American Review, in “the commercial and industrial age in which we live…wealth has been produced as if by magic, and fallen largely to the captains of industry, greatly to their own surprise.” Attempting to divine the root cause behind the “difference in wealth” that marked this age, Carnegie found it not in “labour, nor skill. No, nor superior ability, sagacity, nor enterprise, nor greater public service. The community created the millionaire’s wealth. While he slept it grew as fast as when he was awake.”6 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0eg09tpy4nqj0760nzq3n6r)) - What Carnegie was trying to say was that his success was due, in large part, to his luck in being in the right place, Pittsburgh, at the right time, the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the nation and its railway networks were expanding westward. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j0eg3e9x6xbxpk91gxhsa32m))