The Richest Man In The World: The Ugly Truth

Andrew Carnegie Documentary: How does a boy born into poverty become the richest man in the world? Andrew Carnegie is the personification of the American Dream; an extraordinary rise from the very bottom to the absolute financial top. However, I must warn you: there are two different sides to Andrew Carnegie. On the one hand, Andrew Carnegie was a hypocrite - he preached about workers rights publicly, and yet privately he slashed his workers wages, significantly increased their working hours, and essentially exploited his staff as slave labour in barbaric dangerous conditions to build his fortune. Carnegie destroyed unions, and his actions resulted in countless unnecessary brutal deaths - for example the tragedy of Homestead.

And yet, on the other hand, Andrew Carnegie may be the greatest ever philanthropist - after becoming the richest man in the world, he then spent the rest of his life giving almost all of that money away via philanthropy. He funded universities, schools and nearly 3000 free public libraries around the world to help others improve their own position in life. Many believe he inspired future billionaires to give more of their money away and embrace corporate philanthropy. Andrew Carnegie is also responsible for incredible innovation that helped build America and change the way we do business - we’ll look at his rise through the corporate ranks and how he built his fortune in the steel business. Andrew Carnegie’s story is both an inspiring rags to riches tale, and a controversial business documentary. And the history of Andrew Carnegie involves several other business titans - for example Carnegie was bitter rivals with John D Rockefeller, and also ended up making the biggest business deal in history with JP Morgan, which is how Carnegie became the richest man alive. But before all that wealth and drama, we need to travel back to Scotland in 1835, where Andrew Carnegie was born into abject poverty…