Finalised on February 25, 1901, John Pierpont (JP) Morgan owner of Federal Steel Co. (formed 1898) following the ~$492 million purchase of Andrew Carnegie‘s Carnegie Steel Co. (formed 1873), along with 8 other companies, formed the United States Steel Corporation, a “authorized capitalization of $1.4 billion”, becoming the first billion dollar corporation in US history. The consolidation deal was formulated and negotiated by Elbert Henry Gary and Charles M. Schwab, Morgan and Carnegie’s respective representatives. [1, 2]
The philanthropic funds of Carnegie formed the Carnegie Foundation in 1905, which went on to shape the system of education in America, especially the medical system.
JP Morgan was “the nucleus of turn-of-the-century America’s banking sector”, where he had amassed a financial empire that, by the 1890s, wielded more power than the United States Treasury itself. He teamed up with his close allies, the House of Rothschild, to bail out the US government during a gold shortage in 1895 and acted as a “one-man Federal Reserve Bank” following the Panic of 1907 (which he helped to precipitate) by locking 120 of the country’s most prestigious bankers in his library and forcing them to reach a deal on a $25 million loan to keep the banking system afloat, James Corbett reports. Three years later in 1910 in a secret meeting at a JP Morgan Estate on Jekyll Island, the Federal Reserve Act was crafted.