--- title: "Thirty Fortunes, One Republic: Forbes’s First Count of American Wealth" description: "In 1918 the magazine asked the nation’s bankers who owned America; Rockefeller alone passed the billion-dollar mark" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-09-28T04:48:52.178Z modified: 2026-09-28T05:14:36Z url: https://rews.cc/a/thirty-fortunes-one-republic-forbes-s-first-count-of-america-c08e04 language: en tags: ["wealth", "history", "rockefeller", "carnegie", "ford", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Thirty Fortunes, One Republic: Forbes’s First Count of American Wealth *In 1918 the magazine asked the nation’s bankers who owned America; Rockefeller alone passed the billion-dollar mark* By Jan Sokol · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/thirty-fortunes-one-republic-forbes-s-first-count-of-america-c08e04 ## In brief - Forbes first tracked America’s richest in 1918, when B.C. Forbes surveyed leading bankers to rank the top 30 fortunes - John D. Rockefeller led at $1.2 billion; Frick was second at $225 million and Carnegie third at $200 million - The 30 fortunes totaled nearly $3.7 billion when US money in circulation was under $5 billion - The 30 richest Americans of 2026 hold $4.4 trillion — 50 times the 1918 group, inflation-adjusted; Musk briefly hit $1 trillion in June - Over 70% of today’s Forbes 400 are self-made; no Ford, Astor or Vanderbilt fortunes remain on the list Every empire of money needs its census. Forbes began publishing the annual Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans only in 1982, but the magazine’s counting started much earlier — in 1918, with the guns of the Great War still warm, when its founder B.C. Forbes surveyed “the foremost bankers in the country” to name America’s 30 greatest fortunes. It was, in its way, an audit of a young plutocracy. At the top stood John D. Rockefeller. His Standard Oil had been broken into 34 smaller — but lucrative — companies by the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1911, yet the dismemberment had not impoverished the man. “Rockefeller’s fortune passed the billion-dollar mark, I am told, three or four years ago,” B.C. wrote. Worth $1.2 billion — some $29 billion in today’s dollars — Rockefeller had enough, the magazine calculated, to give ten bucks to everyone in the United States, the equivalent of $240 today. He gave away more than $500 million during his lifetime, worth at least $11.5 billion now, and his heirs still hold an estimated $12.5 billion. ## Steel, coke and the fear of dying rich Second place went to Henry Clay Frick, who quietly forged $225 million selling coke — the steelmaking raw material — to Andrew Carnegie and partnering in Carnegie’s steel businesses. Carnegie himself ranked third at $200 million. He had written *The Gospel of Wealth*, a precursor to Gates and Buffett’s Giving Pledge, preaching that “he who dies thus rich, dies disgraced,” and donated an estimated $350 million, worth at least $6.5 billion today. Even so, as B.C. put it, he remained “in danger of dying disgraced.” The roster is a directory of an industrial republic. George F. Baker, who rose from bank teller to president of the First National Bank and whose “aversion to being interviewed is deeper than the Atlantic,” later took $5 million in 1924 — around $100 million today — and single-handedly funded the creation of the Harvard Business School. J. Ogden Armour grew the Chicago meatpacking firm’s sales from $182 million to more than $1 billion, then lost nearly everything to a postwar slump and $50 million worth of German marks. Charles M. Schwab climbed from stake driver to president of Carnegie Steel, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel, lavished money on friends and family, and died broke. Vincent Astor made the list while overseas fighting in the war, having loaned the government his yacht for use as a warship; his father had gone down with the *Titanic*. Ed. H.R. Green, son of Hetty Green, the “Witch of Wall Street,” grew up in cheap boarding houses under his miserly mother’s fear of kidnapping — then inherited her fortune and bought estates, yachts and a private airport. ## What thirty fortunes could buy Here the 1918 arithmetic turns vertiginous. The 30 richest people in America had amassed nearly $3.7 billion at a time when the typical household earned less than $2,000 a year. “The aggregate amount of money in circulation in the United States is less than $5,000,000,000,” the magazine wrote then. “If the thirty could turn their wealth into cash, they could absorb more than two-thirds of all the money in the country.” One can stand before that sentence a long time. Thirty people, on paper, against the entire money supply of the republic. And yet the century has outdone them. The 30 richest Americans on the 2026 list are worth $4.4 trillion — 50 times richer than the 1918 thirty, even after adjusting for inflation. In June, Elon Musk briefly became the world’s first trillionaire; he is 30 times richer, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than Rockefeller was. The billionaire class controls far less of a much larger economy, but in absolute weight the modern fortune dwarfs the old. ## The vanishing inheritances Time, it turns out, is the sharpest tax collector of all. The 1918 fortunes built enduring monuments — Kodak cameras, Duke University — but the fortunes themselves have mostly been dissipated by time or destroyed by competitors. No Fords, Astors or Vanderbilts appear on today’s Forbes 400. Even the Rockefeller riches have spread across scores of heirs worth far less than $1 billion apiece. The character of wealth has turned with it. In 1918 roughly two-thirds of the 30 richest made their money manufacturing products or harvesting raw materials. Now half of the Forbes 400 got rich in finance or technology, including dozens of artificial intelligence moguls — and more than 70% of today’s listees are counted as self-made, builders rather than heirs. The census continues. The names change; the counting never stops.