Railroad Tycoons and the Creation of Big Business in America

The rail industry in the United States was a pretty big disaster in its first couple of decades—deeply in debt, poorly maintained, and rife with corruption and competition between different rail businesses. But then, somehow, they coalesced into America’s first mega-corporation. The railway tycoons of the early 1900s created the big business playbook still used today by business leaders like Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik tells the story in his book, “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads and the Making of Modern America.”