The Wizard of Wall Street and His Wealth; or, The Life and Deeds of Jay GouldWhite, Trumbull
History
The Wizard of Wall Street and His Wealth; or, The Life and Deeds of Jay Gould
White, Trumbull
Businessmen -- United States -- Biography; Capitalists and financiers -- United States -- Biography; Gould, Jay, 1836-1892
“Mr. Gould was the most generous of men, and he made a great many other
men rich by his own generosity. I could give you hundreds of instances
where in return for some slight service to him he has started men in
the way of making fortunes. There is one which just comes to mind
while I am talking which is a good illustration. Once there was a man
out West who did some little work for Mr. Gould in a railroad matter
there. The man was of the ordinary type of a Westerner on the frontier.
Mr. Gould said to me: ‘I ought to do something for him; what would
you suggest?’ I replied, ‘Buy him a thousand shares of stock for a
rise.’ He said, ‘All right,’ and ordered the purchase of 1,000 shares
of Denver and Rio Grande. The stock was then about 29. We carried it
along until it reached a very high point and looked like going off, and
then we sold it. The profit was $65,000 and I paid that money, all of
it, sixty-five bills of $1,000 each, to that man myself. Mr. Gould had
ordered that transaction for that particular purpose. He took none of
the profit himself, but directed that the man should have it all.
“There were many instances,” continued Mr. Morosini, “of just that
sort, and many in which he greatly helped men there in Wall street
from going down--men whom he was under no obligation to help, but he
assisted them under an impulse of generosity.”
In regard to Mr. Gould’s business methods, Mr. Morosini said: “Of
course, he was very reserved. He never let the left hand know what
the right hand did. His motto was never to say ‘cat’ until you had
him in the bag. For instance, he asked me one day to call in about
$8,000,000--which we had loaned out. I followed his instructions; the
money was collected; he said nothing to anybody about why he had called
it in. I kept the money for nearly a month, when one day he told me
that I might loan it out again, as he had no more use for it; that he
had intended it for use in buying the Reading road, but the deal had
fallen through and therefore it might as well be drawing interest. That
was the first I knew of what he had in contemplation when he called
the money in. Then again, when he bought the Missouri Pacific, his
negotiations with Commodore Garrison were carried on for three months,
and it was only when he asked me to draw checks and told me to whom
they should be drawn that the whole thing came out.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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