John Pierpont (JP) Morgan. Was born into a wealthy family. His father was a partner of the firm George Peabody & Co. He completed n Boston; in 1857 he got a job working for the private banking house Duncan, Sherman and Company. In 1860 he was appointed as the American agent and attorney for George Peabody & Company in which his father was a partner. This later became J.S. Morgan & Co and when his father died in 1890 he left it to JP Morgan giving him important European connections and enabling him to run a large foreign reserve business. By the time of his father's death, JP Morgan had already established himself as a good financier. After the Civil War he started buying bad businesses and railroad companies. Consolidation of railroads came to be known as Morganization. On several occasions, JP Morgan also helped the government in its finances. After the government ran into some gold problems, he bought $200 million worth of government bonds with gold thereby preserving the credit of the United States. Some of his detractors had, however, heavily criticized him for the harsh terms of the loan. This had also resulted in a Congressional hearing in 1912, but he walked away largely unscathed. Perhaps the biggest deal he was ever involved in was the forming of the US Steel Corporation, the first billion-dollar corporation. He had bought some mills from Andrew Carnegie and together with some other steel assets formed US Steel - worth approximately $1.2 billion. At the time of his death on March 31, 1913 he had an estate worth around $1.2 billion in today’s money. Compared to his peers of the time, especially Rockefeller, it was not such a large estate.