Sublime

At that moment, Sam was planning to give $15–$30 million to McConnell to defeat the Trumpier candidates in the US Senate races. On a separate front, he explained to me, as the plane descended into Washington, DC, he was exploring the legality of paying Donald Trump himself not to run for president. His team had somehow created a back channel into

And like many of his fellow midwesterners, he railed at the imperialistic financial reign of the Northeast over other regions. In October 1912, Hill purchased two major financial institutions, the First National Bank and the Second National Bank, both of Saint Paul, and in 1913 he merged them under the name of the former. He poured nearly $4

Remember that poker analogy I used earlier? Here in the Bay Area, you’re starting every hand with an ace of spades—which just makes things so much easier. I’ve seen plenty of dumb people in the Bay Area get rich quick, and I’ve seen a lot of smart folks in New York and Los Angeles struggle to break out in angel investing and venture capital.

While Jack Morgan was ensuring that he would have a direct bedroom-to-deck path on his new yacht, Ivar had tiptoed into the deal of the century.

The 1862 Pacific Railway Act made yet another lavish grant of public lands to finance a railway line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, a dream of the prodevelopment party for more than twenty years. The undertaking was still at the very limits of current technology; the act needed several revisions to get the financing right; and the

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Cass and Cheney had their nervous moments, as Dalrymple, like a mini-Rockefeller, expanded into grain elevators, Great Lakes steam transport, and a host of related enterprises. But within just a few years it was clear that the farm operations were a spectacular success. The “Dalrymple farm” had grown to thirty thousand acres by the early 1880s,