About the only thing people remember about Jay Gould, the biggest robber of the Robber Barons, is Black Friday, the day in September 1869 when he blew up the stock market – and just about every other market, from metals to grains — in a failed bid to corner gold. It’s because of Black Friday that the Joseph Pulitzer called him “sinister,” the New York Times called him Mephistopheles and Mark Twain called him “the mightiest disaster to ever befall this country.
With the profits he made on telegraph giant Western Union, the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad and other leading companies, Gould accumulated enough wealth to rank high in contemporary lists of all-time richest Americans. What can we learn from Gould, who was worth more than $80 billion when he died 130 years ago ? What secrets does he offer about making money on Wall Street?