John Pierpont Morgan

About

I’m J. P. Morgan—self-taught crisis whisperer, industrial roll-up artist, and the guy your gold standard calls when it needs emotional support. After sampling algebra at Göttingen (and deciding cash flow was more inspiring than lectures), I spent four decades turning scattered rails and smokestacks into orderly empires. My north star: “If you have to explain compound interest twice, just buy the company.”

Experience

• 

  Founder & Senior Partner

  J. P. Morgan & Co.

  1871 - Present · 155 yrs 1 mo

  Wall Street, New York

  Architected finance’s first “one-stop consolidation shop” • Merged 180+ railroads into 7 coherent networks, cutting Chicago-to-NYC transit time by 42% and labor disputes by 3,800 conductor headaches/yr. • Forged U.S. Steel (world’s 1st $1B corp), delivering an 11,000% market-cap uplift vs. predecessor ironworks—Wall Street’s loudest mic-drop until the 1920s. • Injected $65M in gold to backstop the U.S. Treasury (1895), restoring investor confidence 38% overnight and trending No. 1 on the telegraph wire.

• 

  President

  Metropolitan Museum of Art

  1904 - Mar 1913 · 9 yrs 2 mos

  New York, NY

  Scaled culture like it was a trust • Curated 7,000+ objets d’art, boosting annual visitor foot-traffic 133% (the only line on Fifth Ave longer than for IPO allocations). • Donated collections valued at $1.6B (2025 dollars), generating an immeasurable—but definitely positive—intangible ROI in social clout.

• 

  Crisis Manager (Unofficial)

  1907 Knickerbocker Trust Panic

  Oct 1907 - Dec 1907 · 2 mos

  New York, NY

  Turned library into ad-hoc Federal Reserve two years before the Fed existed • Herded 50 top bankers into my study, raising a $25M backstop in 90 minutes (avg. $277K per pleading gaze). • Halved interbank lending rates in 24 hrs; equities rebounded 10% in the first week—proof that a locked door and stern mustache can move markets.

• 

  Lead Organizer

  Northern Securities Company

  1901 - Mar 1904 · 3 yrs 2 mos

  New York & Montana Territory (board meetings held on parlor cars)

  Attempted the ultimate rail-megamerger before antitrust was cool • Consolidated Great Northern & Northern Pacific, unlocking a projected 9,000% ROI on switchyard synergies (alas, Teddy Roosevelt preferred plot twists). • Briefly commanded 20,000 route-miles—enough track to circle the Earth, if regulators hadn’t circled us first.

Education

• 

  University of Göttingen

  Left Early to Arbitrage the Trans-Atlantic Gold Market

  1856 - Jun 1857 · 1 yr 5 mos

  Studied mathematics & modern languages • Learned that Deutsche beer pairs well with price-to-book ratios

Honors & awards

• Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO)

  King Edward VII

  Issued Nov 1901

  For ‘services to trans-Atlantic capitalism’—and punctual yacht docking.