Charles Schwab

Charles Schwab started off as a store clerk across the street from Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill in Braddock PA. 

 The superintendent, Civil War veteran "Captain" Bill Jones bought his cigars at the store, and the plucky Charlie asked for a job.

 He started on the surveying crew and by 1889 had replaced the Captain who was killed in a mill mishap. In another 8yrs he had displaced Henry Clay Frick as President of Carnegie Steel, and then in 1900 brokered the deal between Carnegie and JP Morgan to form US Steel which he then became President of.

 Shortly thereafter he bought a controlling interest in then-small Bethlehem Steel and moved over there as President, and soon thereafter (1907) seized on the European process of making large, single-piece I (or H) beams which reaped huge profits and almost certainly fueled the explosion of skyscrapers.

He also built the largest mansion ever built in Manhattan (Riverside, d1949), commissioned a private rail car (extant, in NC), bankrolled a mining town in NV with its own stock exchange bldg (Rhyolite, now a ghost town), and was the head of President Wilson's Emergency Fleet Corp that controlled all shipbuilding during WWI.

 Somewhere along the line he bought a large (possibly controlling) interest in Stutz Motors.

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