According to historian Ron Chernow, Andrew Carnegie named his price for Carnegie Steel while golfing at St. Andrews Golf Club in Westchester County, New York. He wrote $480 million on a slip of paper, and Charles M. Schwab carried it to J.P. Morgan. “I accept this price,” Morgan said, per American Heritage.
Carnegie later believed he could have asked for another $100 million, American Heritage reported. Morgan told him on a transatlantic crossing, “Very likely, Andrew.”
Serious negotiations began on Dec. 12, 1900, at Manhattan’s University Club, according to EBSCO Research Starters. The company that came out of the deal, U.S. Steel, was formally incorporated on Feb. 26, 1901, and announced on March 2. Its declared capitalization of $1.403 billion made it the world’s first corporation of that scale.
Carnegie wanted to convert his holdings into securities that could be traded easily and passed along to his charities and endowments, per EBSCO. He gave away roughly 90 percent of his fortune, about $350 million, according to History.com.
The exact figure was $350,695,653 by the time Carnegie died in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1919, according to a Bucknell University history page. The last $30 million went to foundations, charities, and pensioners at his death.
He had said as much decades earlier. In his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” he wrote, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” per History.com.
Libraries were his best-known cause. Carnegie paid nearly $56.2 million to build 2,509 libraries between 1883 and 1929.
In 1911, he set up the Carnegie Corporation of New York with a $135 million endowment, according to the Christian Science Monitor. It still funds education, democracy and international peace, per History.com.
Carnegie was not the last tycoon to give away a fortune. Chuck Feeney gave away more than $8 billion in secret and closed his foundation in 2020 once it had spent every dollar.