Hey, Thoughty2 here.
As you’ve probably noticed, modern society has something of an obsession
with entrepreneurs. So much so that the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson,
Jack Ma, and Jeff Bezos get more column inches in most newspapers and magazines
than your average Hollywood A-lister. Kids these days don’t dream of being astronauts,
they want to be tech billionaires. Keen to tap into such lofty ambitions among the modern youth,
an entire cottage industry has sprung up almost overnight, with self help books, influencers, and
podcasters all promising to tell you the ONE THING that EVERY billionaire does in the morning. As
if all you have to do to become rich beyond your wildest dreams is set your alarm for 4am and down
a goji berry smoothie the instant you wake up. In reality, of course, there is no one
secret trick to becoming a billionaire… or is there? Well, no. There definitely isn’t.
But there is one thing the vast majority of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs happen
to have in common - including all the ones I mentioned at the start of this video. I’ll give
you a clue - it starts with p and ends with eenis. As unpalatable a truth as it may be, we live in a
world where practically every famous entrepreneur is in possession of one regular-sized, standard
issue… Y chromosome - according to Forbes, only about 10% of the more than 2000
billionaires on the planet are women. But you don’t have to go all that far back
in history to find yourself in a time when a list of the richest people in the world
would have been even more overwhelmingly male - overwhelmingly male… but not entirely.
Hetty Green was an American businesswoman who made a fortune on Wall Street in the 1800s,
decades before women were even allowed to vote. But, being a woman didn’t change how
much she liked holding on to her money. In fact, when it came to parting with cash, this millionaire was tighter than your y-fronts
after an episode of Bridgerton. And that’s not just my opinion – the Guinness Book of World
Records named her the planet’s ‘greatest miser’. As if being recognised as the biggest cheapskate
on earth isn’t enough, Hetty’s also commonly remembered as the ‘Witch of Wall Street’, and
not just for her ability to make money appear out of thin air. No, it was a deliberately mean
nickname, because even though she probably wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, Hetty was
also a woman who flourished in a man’s world. She lived in a time when society expected
well-to-do members of the fairer sex to look pretty, smile, and leave the important
things in life to the nearest man. Instead, Hetty carried a gun, cussed like a sailor, and objected
to masculine control – famously making her husband sign a prenuptial agreement so that he would have
no claim to her money should things go south. That kind of thing may work for Beyoncé, but
a century and a half ago it was practically unheard of. But despite the many negative
stories we’re going to hear about Hetty, she actually had quite a few redeeming features.
We just need to look a bit harder to find them. Hetty was born into a wealthy Massachusetts
whaling family in 1834. Her younger brother died as a baby and her mother was often ill, so
Hetty spent much of her childhood living with her grandparents, and it was her grandfather Gideon
who gave her her first lessons in commerce. He had dodgy eyes, and so six year old Hetty used to
read the finance section of the newspaper to him, with Gideon providing a running commentary on
the news of the day, including why certain stocks were a good investment and others weren’t.
Young Hetty also accompanied her grandfather and father down to the docks where
they did their business dealings, which had the combined effect of teaching Hetty
a good deal about both the art of negotiation, and the science of swearing like a
sailor after half a litre of rum. She also learned her way around the business’s
ledgers, and by the age of 13 she was skilled enough to act as her father’s bookkeeper.
As well as how to run a business, Hetty’s father taught her how to invest and generally
look after money, which is how, years later, when he transitioned the family business
from whaling oil to shipping cargo, Hetty, would be a crucial part of building an impressive
portfolio of real estate, stocks, and bonds. To complete this somewhat untraditional ‘school
of life’ education, Hetty was privately tutored and attended a Quaker boarding school. But the
docks had clearly left their imprint on the girl, because her Aunt Sylvia insisted she attend a
finishing school in the hope of turning young Hetty into a lady. As was the way of the
times, the entire system was designed to secure girls a decent husband; Hetty was said
to be an attractive young woman, so her father was keen to see her marry well. He bought her a
wardrobe of lovely dresses to attract a suitable, well, suitor, but Hetty was having
none of that - she sold the gowns and invested the money in government bonds instead.
Despite her best efforts, Hetty still managed to attract her fair share of admirers, and it was
while staying with her father in New York after the death of her mother that Hetty met someone she
admired back - her future husband, Edward Green. Green was a wealthy businessman, so at
least he and Hetty had that in common, but he was fond of the high life and spending
money, a passion they certainly didn’t share. Hetty lived at a time when married women weren’t
seen as full and individual people in the eyes of the law. - Women had no right to vote, and a
married woman’s property was legally controlled by her husband. For this reason, Hetty’s
father included a clause in his will that stated any husband of Hetty’s wasn’t to inherit
the money he left to her. He needn’t have worried though - Hetty had no interest in dishing out
her wealth and made Edward sign an agreement that would keep their finances separate. It would prove
to be an astute move, but more on that later. Hetty inherited around $7 million from
her father when he passed away in 1865, worth about $125 million today, but by her
father’s requirements the bulk of the fortune was to be kept in a trust fund that Hetty had no
control over. Later in the same year, her Aunt Sylvia also died, leaving Hetty the inheritance
from her wealthy grandfather, Gideon. But just like her father’s will, aunt Sylvia’s contained a
few nasty surprises. Around half of the money - $1 million - was left to charity and the rest was to
be kept in yet another inaccessible trust fund. Even considering the trust
funds and charity donations, Hetty had still inherited an incredible
fortune, but as far as she was concerned, that wasn’t the point. She’d been
cheated out of what was rightfully hers, and she was going to get back… even if doing
so involved a little cheating of her own. Aunt Sylvia’s will had been finalised in 1863,
but conveniently enough, Hetty managed to dig up an older copy of the document - dated 1862
- in which the entire fortune was left to her. Even more conveniently, the will contained
a nifty little clause that confirmed any future wills were null and void.
A 5 year legal battle ensued, but eventually the signatures on Hetty’s version
of the will were declared to be forgeries. They must have been pretty bad ones too, because
forensic analysis of the pen strokes concluded that the odds of the signatures being genuine were
about one in two and a half sextillion. Despite having apparently scribbled her aunt’s name on a
fake will in wax crayons, for some reason Hetty was never charged with fraud - perhaps because
she buggered off to London for a few years till the heat died down - but she certainly learned
her lesson about the world of counterfeiting. In her future business dealings she
would never again sign her name, always asking others to sign on her behalf so that
nobody could copy her signature and swindle her. By now, Hetty was an active investor and used
the interest from her father’s trust fund to grow her wealth exponentially. She invested
heavily in railroads, real estate, and government bonds and, according to her, success was
just a case of buying when stock was low and selling it when it was high. So that’s
where we’ve been going wrong all this time. In contrast to Hetty’s style, her
husband was rather more cavalier, and he made some bad investments
that led to significant losses. Despite her reputation as the world’s greatest
miser, Hetty had the patience and generosity of a saint when it came to her husband, bailing him
out multiple times over the years. But in 1885, Edward made a fatal mistake - no doubt embarrassed
about finding himself in a sticky financial spot again, he secretly withdrew just over half a
million dollars from one of Hetty’s accounts. The bank refused the transfer but for Hetty the
act was unforgivable and the couple separated. At the time, Hetty was worth around $26 million
- that’s three quarters of a billion in 2022. But, despite wealth that most people literally
can’t imagine, she lived like she was on the breadline. Using various aliases, Hetty moved
between apartments, hotels, and boarding houses so she could avoid paying property tax. She
didn’t want to rent an office, so she worked from the Chemical Bank, one of the companies she
was invested in, where she could be found managing her business from a vacant desk, and when one
of those wasn’t available, from the floor. When Hetty had oats for lunch, she’d put
the bowl on the radiator to save the cost of heating water on the stove. It’s also said
that she saved money by requesting that only the hems of her dresses be cleaned because
those were the only parts that got dirty. Well, I say ‘dresses,’ apparently Hetty
only actually had one dress at any time, which she’d wear until it basically fell apart.
When her estranged husband died in 1902 that dress became a black one, and it was then that the
‘Witch of Wall Street’ nickname really took hold. Probably the most widely reported story
of penny-pinching involved Hetty’s son, Ned, who suffered a broken leg in
a sledging accident as a child. Hetty initially took him to a clinic for
the poor where medical care was free, but she was eventually recognised and Ned’s
treatment was withdrawn. Many accounts claim that Hetty decided to care for Ned at home
rather than pay for treatment, though some sources suggest she probably did try and find
alternative doctors. Whatever the exact details, Ned’s leg didn’t heal properly. Gangrene set
in, and eventually the limb had to be amputated. Interestingly enough, Ned seems to have
been one of his mother’s biggest fans. He gave several interviews during the course
of his life, and he painted a very different picture of the world-famous miser who
may - or may not - have cost him his leg. According to him, Hetty supported numerous
charities with sums that today would run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. She also loaned
money to about thirty churches at below-market interest rates, and she paid dozens of families
a regular income to help them manage living expenses. Hetty was also very loyal to those
close to her. A bookkeeper named Benjamin Lawton worked for her father before working for
her, and Hetty kept him on the payroll well into his old age, even though most
of his day was spent snoozing at his desk. According to Ned, the reason nobody knew about
any of these good deeds was simple - Hetty believed in what she called discreet charity.
She did good things because she wanted to, not because she thought it would play well
with investors, shareholders, and the press. In the early part of the twentieth century, a
financial crisis known as the Panic of 1907 shook Wall Street, wiping 50% of the value of the New
York Stock Exchange in the space of just 3 weeks. True to form Hetty saw the crash coming,
and not only did she safeguard the bulk of her fortune from the repercussions, she also had
plenty of cash on hand to loan to those in need. Most businessmen in America lost money during the
Panic of 1907, but Hetty only got richer. So rich, in fact, that during the worst of the market
crash, she actually bailed out the City of New York with a massive loan. Over the following
fews years, she - a private individual - would become the city’s largest lender.
Hetty finally cashed in her chips in 1916 at the age of 81, with an estimated
net worth of close to $5 billion in today’s terms. That made her easily the richest woman
in America, and very probably the entire world. In many ways it's hard to know what to make
of this remarkable woman. For the most part, history seems to have remembered her as a bit
of a villain, and her outrageous stinginess was admittedly pretty unforgivable - after all the
best thing the ultra-wealthy can do is spend their cash to help the economy. But it does her memory
a disservice to focus only on the negatives. This was a woman who flagrantly ignored
the oppressive sexist customs of her times to do things her own way. A woman who played
the men of Wall Street at their own game - and absolutely obliterated them while she was at it.
And most of all, a woman who deliberately chose to keep the many good things she did for her
friends, neighbours, and city to herself. In the days when doing a good deed is only worth it
if you can immediately post it on social media, I think that’s pretty cool.
Thanks for watching.
