He started working in the telegraph business, then for railroad companies, and finally in the steel industry. From bitter poverty, he worked with focus and developed his mind, and eventually became one of the wealthiest men on earth. How much money did he have? The answer is not entirely clear. Naturally, his exact net worth varied over the years. Any dollar amount given would have to be adjusted for more than a century’s worth of inflation. Any figure ventured would be preceded by the word ‘approximately’ and qualified with the phrase ‘at least’ because such reckonings cannot be precise.
At various points, his net worth was at least approximately $500 million, and it could have easily been double that. Adjusted to dollar amounts in the year 2026, that would be roughly $20 billion.
These numbers are minimums. Depending on which assets are counted, and how they are counted, even tripling those figures might be possible.
Was Carnegie the “richest” man in the world? Again, it is difficult to give a precise answer. At the time, there were empires, and the dynasties who ruled them counted vast amounts of land and palaces as personal property. There might have been emperors — in Russia, China, Germany, Austria, or Britain — who were worth more on paper. Carnegie was probably the richest businessman in the world.
The newspapers of the first two decades of the twentieth century sometimes referred to Carnegie as “the world’s richest man.” Yet when he died in 1919, he made sure that he was no longer qualified for this title. “Carnegie, who acquired” the reputation of being the world’s richest man “in 1901, when he sold his Pennsylvania steel empire to rival J.P. Morgan for the then-unimaginable sum of $480 million, had spent many of the intervening years giving away his fortune,” writes historian Les Standiford.
Andrew Carnegie gave away hundreds of millions of dollars.
The amount of money he had at one point in time was amazing. Equally amazing was the amount he gave away, so that by the time he died, his net worth was not even a tenth of what it had been.
In addition to the funding of some 2,800 public libraries across the United States and as far away as Fiji and New Zealand, he had endowed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in his adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Carnegie Research Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Carnegie Educational Foundation in New York City, as well as the Endowment for International Peace. This last endowment was, in the final decade of his life, the cornerstone of his attempts to sway the nations of the world from their fixation upon war as a solution to political problems.Carnegie’s efforts to secure world peace would cost nearly $25 million ($5.5 billion today), but that was a pittance compared to all his giving.
Les Standiford wrote the paragraph above in 2005. By 2026, the number would be even greater.
Carnegie was personally involved in his institutional donations. He did not delegate these decisions. The cities of Braddock and Homestead in Pennsylvania, separated only by a river, were of special interest to him.
“At the 1889 dedication of the beautifully designed Braddock Public Library — a sprawling sandstone structure more aptly described as a community center, complete with auditorium, swimming pool, and spacious reading rooms — Andrew Carnegie had capped the ceremonies” by giving a brief speech by referring to himself as one “of those who labor and perform a use in the community.” He saw himself as serving society.
Directly across the Monongahela River from the city of Braddock was the city of Homestead. Carnegie owned production facilities in both towns. His relationship to the large workforces in those two towns had not always been the friendliest, yet he chose to give to these communities, as Les Standiford reports:
Carnegie finally built a library for the workers of Homestead in 1898, an even grander sandstone monument than its counterpart across the river in Braddock. The building, complete with pool, auditorium, and lofty reading rooms, still stands.
He also made gifts to towns in which he had no direct business interests. He gave to towns around the world. He was looking for opportunities to make a difference.
One of Carnegie’s libraries went up in the blue-collar hill town of Cambridge, Ohio, shortly after the turn of the century. It wasn’t on the scale of those virtual palaces in Braddock and Homestead; the library grants were tied to the size of the population, and Cambridge was an unprepossessing town of a few thousand souls.
The building seemed extravagant in such a town, and became a point of local pride.
The building seemed grand. The staircases were broad and made of marble, the ceilings were high, the walls paneled in wood.
Prior to his retirement from the business world in 1901, Carnegie had engaged in generous charitable giving. After retirement, his efforts in this direction increased significantly, and he spent a great deal of time funding projects to help society.
By all appearances, the principal occupation of “the richest man in the world” from the moment of his retirement was giving all his money away.While he had long been building libraries around the nation and the world, and had, as early as 1892, provided $2 million to build Carnegie Hall (originally named the New York City Music Hall), the “wee Andra” now threw himself into philanthropic activity with a zeal.
In the Scottish speech of Carnegie’s childhood, “wee Andra” would be equivalent to “little Andy” in American English. His $2,000,000 donation in 1892 would be approximately $71,820,879 in 2026 dollars. One of his more famous comments was: “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”
Although entire volumes have been written on Carnegie’s philanthropy and on individual Carnegie foundations, a thumbnail overview might convey just how much $327 million can accomplish:The endowment of nearly three thousand public library buildings around the world accounted for some $60 million of his total giving.
The reader will notice that the math of trying to express the size of Carnegie’s various projects in 2026 dollars is not entirely consistent in the examples here given. This is because various historians and economists reckon differently. These numbers are best understood as impressions.
It’s worth noting that some of the public buildings that Carnegie funded took on his name only after his death. While he was alive, he gave many of these institutions names which did not include any reference to him. Many of these buildings never took on his name, and so he remains an effectively anonymous donor to this day, e.g., in the case of local libraries.
Few acts of philanthropy have enjoyed such universal, enduring recognition; nearly a thousand of the buildings are still in use as libraries to this day, more than thirty in the boroughs of New York City alone.
Likewise, houses of worship house valuable musical instruments with no obvious reference to the Carnegie name. While Carnegie was religious and spiritual, he was not exceptionally enthusiastic about organized religion. For most of his life, he was a member of the Presbyterian church, but was not much involved beyond sporadic Sunday morning attendance. He was personally friends with several of the church’s pastors, and donated generously to the church.
Despite his complicated relationship with organized religion, he funded the construction and installation of approximately 7,000 pipe organs in various churches, as Les Standiford writes:
Even more ubiquitous than his libraries were the organs he had given to churches. This was a program that had begun almost by accident, after Carnegie gave an organ to a church in Allegheny City, his first American home. Before it was over, Carnegie, an agnostic who said he continued the practice because it “lessened the pain of the sermons,” had given away nearly eight thousand organs, at a cost of over $6 million.
Keeping his eyes open for projects, he encountered many of them serendipitously. This accounts for the broad range of interest areas: from libraries to churches to education.
“In 1902, he” donated “$32 million to endow the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a still-extant think tank for advanced research in the sciences,” writes Les Standiford.
Carnegie had a deep attachment to the United States, but also to the country of his birth, and was happy to fund projects in both places.
At about the same time, he established the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland with a gift of $10 million.
One library in particular became the seed for a much larger project:
In 1895, Carnegie dedicated the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, an imposing, 300-foot-long structure made possible by a grant of $1 million. By the turn of the twentieth century, the library had become the centerpiece of the still-standing Carnegie Institute, a monument to culture that included art and science museums and a concert hall. Ultimately, Carnegie’s original $1 million investment would grow to more than $25 million.At a Pittsburgh dinner in late 1900, Carnegie announced that he was offering the city a $1 million endowment to build a technical school as an adjunct to the Institute. He would later add another $6.5 million. First called the Carnegie Technical Schools, then the Carnegie Institute of Technology, it was merged in 1967 with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (founded by Andrew Mellon in 1913) and is known today as Carnegie Mellon University.
Constantly making connections to various non-profit schemes, he seems to have worked as hard in giving away his money as he did in earning it in the first place.
Another major gift to education came in 1905, when Carnegie, prompted by a visit to Skibo from Henry Pritchett, the president of MIT, gave $15 million to create the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The foundation went on to found such programs as the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and the Educational Testing Service. It still operates worldwide.In 1911, somewhat overwhelmed by the task of giving away money, he made his single greatest gift, endowing the Carnegie Corporation of New York, formed for “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge,” with $125 million. The corporation was to oversee many of the projects already undertaken, as well as to create a board of trustees that would assume the burden of determining worthy recipients for the remainder of Carnegie’s fortune, which totaled about $180 million. Today the Carnegie Corporation’s endowment is valued at about $1.8 billion and continues its work in teacher education, and increased participation of the citizenry in the political process.
Carnegie’s gifts supported a wide range of projects, many still in operation, including the Carnegie Hero Fund ($5 million), designed in 1904 to recognize extraordinary acts of peacetime bravery and compensate those injured while performing those acts of heroism.
Over a century later, Carnegie’s cash is still at work. The libraries are still operating in towns around America and in towns around the world; the organs still playing hymns on Sunday mornings; the university buildings still standing and the university endowments still funding educations; the peace institutes still orchestrating diplomatic meetings.
Such creations as the Hero Fund continue to affect the lives of citizens worldwide (the fund made a significant number of awards in the wake of the September 11 tragedy).
Like many people of his time, Andrew Carnegie saw WW1 approaching. The competitions and tensions between the European powers clearly were nudging that continent toward war.
He hoped to fund diplomatic efforts to diffuse tensions and avoid wars.
In all his record of giving, however, nothing came to engage Carnegie more deeply than his quest to put an end to war between nations. Though it may be commonplace today for a schoolchild to begin an essay with a heartfelt desire “to achieve world peace,” for Carnegie, it was no mere wish upon a star.
Carnegie’s efforts to find diplomatic solutions to international conflicts lifted The Hague from being a national capital to an global ambassadorial meeting place and the seat of international justice. Les Standiford explains:
Carnegie delivered a blistering speech early in the century at New York’s Metropolitan Club, where he denounced war as the “foulest blot upon humanity today.” He questioned just how far civilization could be said to have progressed, “as long as we can find no better substitute for the settling of international disputes than the brutal murder of one another.One of the immediate results was the endowment of an international law library and center for the arbitration of disputes between nations at The Hague, site of an 1899 conference on world peace. Though he was at first hesitant about usurping the business of nations, Carnegie ultimately gave $1.5 million for the construction of the International Peace Palace and the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
In 1910, heartened by President Taft’s resolve to ensure his own legacy as a peacemaker among nations, and disturbed by growing tensions in Europe, Carnegie approached Taft with the idea of endowing a private organization to support the president’s agenda. After consulting with Taft and his secretary of state (and former Carnegie Company attorney), Philander C. Knox, Carnegie made his proposal. In return for Taft’s efforts to secure a network of peace treaties between the United States and other major powers Carnegie would contribute $10 million to endow the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “to a thorough and scientific investigation and study of the causes of war and of practice methods to prevent and avoid it.”
Andrew Carnegie decisively shaped many features of our world today, and he did so not seeking power, fame, money, or self-aggrandizement, but seeking rather to rid himself of his huge fortune and make the world a better place.
