Answer:
There was a time in U.S. history when the business magnates and titans of industry boasted more wealth than even today’s top technology innovators and visionaries.
During America’s Gilded Age — which spanned most of the latter half of the 19th century, from around 1870 to 1900 — the inflation-adjusted wealth and impact of America’s most towering figures far overshadowed what we see today.
The wealth of people like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie would by today’s standards be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars — far more than tech giants like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and even Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest individual in the world as of 2019.
Wealth so vast can often highlight the financial inequality of an era. It’s this idea of grandeur in the face of unresolved social concerns that led Mark Twain to coin the phrase “Gilded Age” in his 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. The title suggested that the thin veneer of wealth for the elite masked broader issues for many in the lower and middle classes.