Sublime

Donald Durant understood the common person, someone élite bankers, including the Higginsons, had politely ignored for decades. Since the Civil War, bankers had focused on wealthy institutions: first the railroads, then industrial companies, and most recently foreign corporations and governments. But now that individual human beings, men and women,

This is the most important single business decision I ever made: to pay people well.

In 2014, Forbes ranked him as the 134th richest American, at $3.8 billion. One of his hires was Jeff Bezos, who, while researching business opportunities in 1994 for Shaw, got the idea for an online bookstore and left to start a company called Amazon.com. At $30 billion in 2014, Bezos was the fifteenth richest American.