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.