Charles M. Schwab (1862-1939)
President of Carnegie Steel, the U.S. Steel Corporation & Bethlehem Steel
He became the President of Carnegie Steel at the age of 35 in 1897 and he was the first President of the U.S. Steel Corporation. He left in 1903 to run Bethlehem Steel, the second largest steel maker in the States, helping to make it the largest independent steel producer in the world as well as the main supplier of munitions for the Allied Forces in World War I. He and his wife died without children, but they raised her nephew, Carlton Wagner, and he had a daughter by a nurse who he saw twice a year and put up in a fine hotel in Washington D.C. with a chauffeur and a companion. Knowing how Carnegie would frown on his extra-marital affair, he was unable to formally adopt his daughter. In 1918, he came in at thirteenth (tied with James Stillman, Daniel Guggenheim, Thomas F. Ryan and J.P. Morgan, Jr.) on the first ever Forbes Rich List with an estimated personal fortune of $70-million and between 1902 and 1906 he built the 75-room "Riverside" (see images) on Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th Street. However, by the time of his death in 1939 he was significantly in debt and living in comparative poverty.
