Of HBO’s The Gilded Age, Elon Musk, and the Legacy of Jay Gould

Of HBO’s The Gilded Age, Elon Musk, and the Legacy of Jay Gould

Being the author of what has become the “standard” biography of legendary Wall Street financier Jay Gould (1836-1892), in the past year or so I’ve received many queries about Gould as portrayed in the hit HBO series The Gilded Age. These queries have reached a crescendo during the past week, as numerous pundits have struggled to find parallels between Elon Musk and Gould – this in the wake of Musk’s much-discussed Twitter acquisition.

The Gould-inspired character in The Gilded Age goes by the name of George Russell (played splendidly by Morgan Spector). According to Series Executive Producer Julian Fellowes, my book – Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons (2005) – was a primary source for sketching out Jay’s character in the script. But of course, as is the case in any film adaptation of any historical event or epoch, drama always trumps truth. After all, the purpose of the series is to provide entertainment, not supplement 11th grade American history curriculums. So, there are some differences between the real-life Jay Gould and the man known to television viewers as George Russell.

Gould, like Russell, was a self-made man who’d sprung from the humblest of rural beginnings in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Like George Russell, Gould was a shrewd, sharp, and often vilified manipulator of stocks and bonds on a Wall Street which during his era was a virtual wild west where rules were few … and largely ignored. Like Russell, Gould was a devoted family man who stood out amid most of the other moguls of his era, the majority of them lotharios who either frequented lavish, high-end bordellos or kept mistresses in luxurious secret flats.

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Unlike George Russell, Gould had no aspirations to be “accepted” by the social circle of his fellow millionaires. For example, he never sought entry to Caroline Astor’s fabled “400” – that select clique of people whom Mrs. Astor considered to have “the best pedigree.” This was a prized ticket for most, but it seemed to Gould an irrelevant credential. In fact, Gould generally didn’t care for any of the scions boasting fortunes made by ambitious forbears any more than those “old money” people cared for him or his fellow “new money” upstarts of the early industrial age. (There was, by the way, an element of envy among the old families, as the new fortunes of the modern era soon made most of the old fortunes appear rather dwarfish.)

When it comes to Gould and Musk, there are certainly similarities. As was long ago the case with Gould, Musk is a workaholic. He is known to frequently put in 16-hour days. Also like his predecessor, Musk lives and works on the frontiers of technology. For Gould this was railroads and the telegraph (the Gilded Age version of the Internet). For Musk, it is electric cars, space exploration, and now Twitter.

Musk is a hands-on manager: knowledgeable about – and active in – some of the most minute developments within his various concerns. Gould was the same way. Although a Merlin-like magician in the successful trading of stocks and bonds, and the owner/operator of several diverse enterprises through the years ranging from tanneries to newspapers, Gould always remained at heart a railroad man. The lion’s share of his fortune manifested as equity in the many lines of track he’d acquired, expanded, and combined into a vast system encompassing the entire United States. Each and every year he toured all of his holdings in his private railroad car. At every stop he spoke to station managers, brakemen, engineers – gaining a feel for the state of his operations which he could not achieve from within the walls of a boardroom. His most valuable and indispensable employees, he bluntly told his perfectly quaffed lieutenants in their New York office, had coal dust in their hair.

Most importantly, Gould in his time (like Musk today) understood the adage that one should not look at wealth as a goal, but as a tool – not an end, but a means. In this spirit, Gould routinely used his fortune to evince raw power. In 1881, after driving down the value of Western Union shares through fierce, brute-force discounting competition from his own smaller Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, Gould masterminded a merger of the two which gave him a majority share in the newly formed conglomerate. Thus, Gould gained virtual – no pun intended – control of all high-speed communications (and stock tickers) from coast to coast. Musk’s recent storming of the gates of Twitter has much the same feel as did Gould’s storming the gates of the Western Union: unwelcome, unconditional, unequivocal, unpopular, and inevitable.

The United States has a long tradition of making whipping boys out of its most successful innovators and entrepreneurs – everyone from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan to Jeff Bezos and Musk. When Gould died in 1892 – after building a rail infrastructure that to this day serves as a vital pillar of American logistics, and after building the Western Union up from a strictly domestic carrier of information to one of multinational proportions – Joseph Pulitzer opined that Gould had been “one of the most sinister figures” to have ever “flitted batlike across the vision of the American people.”

This type of vilification will always be popular. But most of those who today fall subject to it will likely recognize their “infamy” for just what it is: nothing more than the cost of doing business.

 

Edward Renehan is the author of more than 25 books including Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons (Basic Books, 2005) and a 2019 biography of General Motors mogul Charles Stewart Mott, published by the University of Michigan Press. Learn more at https://edwardrenehan.com.