Ebenezer Scrooge was real, just not with the genitals you expected. Hetty Green was the richest woman alive in the late nineteenth century, worth over $4 billion in today's money (it will all be in today's money). Hetty made her money through shrewd conservative investing, staying calm when others panicked, and being cheap as hell.
Hetty was born into a wealthy whaling family to a workaholic father and a sickly mother. She spent most of her childhood at her father's side, learning the ins and outs of business. The woman could barely write a legible sentence, but by age 6 she was reading stock quotes every evening. Hetty's father tried to marry her off when she came of age, giving her a new wardrobe worth thousands of dollars. Hetty sold the clothes and invested in the stock market. Her father died shortly after the end of the Civil War, leaving her a sizable fortune of $77 million. Hetty celebrated by marrying Edward Green, a man of enough means that he'd keep his hands off her money. She then celebrated her nuptials by forging her recently deceased Aunt Sylvia's will in an attempt to score another $30 million that had been willed to charity. This did not work out well and Hetty was forced to flee to London to escape forgery charges.
In London, Hetty gave birth to two children, Ned and Sylvia (because if you’re going to try to defraud your dead aunt you might as well name your kid after them), and started making money hand over fist by buying paper U.S. dollars that were issued during the Civil War. Once the statute of limitations was up, Hetty and Edward moved their family back to New York, where Hetty started investing in railroads, speculating on the stock market, and buying up mortgages. As her fortune grew, she also started lending money to bankers and brokerage houses. Everything she touched turned to gold. However, when it came to light that Edward had been using some of her money, Hetty took the children and left. It was at this point that things began to go off the rails.
Not seeing much reason to be a spendthrift, Hetty moved her family into a tiny apartment with no heat or hot water (partly to try to hide from the taxman). When her children complained of the cold, she stuffed their clothes with old newspapers. When Ned hurt his leg, Hetty tried to take him to the local free clinic, but was forced to flee when she was recognized as one of the richest women in the country. Refusing to pay for a doctor she instead let Ned's leg get infected to the point where it had to be amputated, which she forced her estranged husband to pay for. As Hetty got older she became even more miserly. At the same time that Hetty was making several multi-million dollar loans to New York City and some of the largest banks in the country to help keep them solvent, she was wearing the same black dress that she had worn every day for years on end. It’s probably also worth mentioning that she commanded her laundress to only wash the dirty parts of the dress in order to save on soap.
Hetty's frugality became the stuff of legends. For twenty years she suffered from a painful hernia, which she held in by jamming a small stick in her underwear. When it became too much a problem she went to a doctor who promptly told her he could fix it for $3,500. In response, Hetty calmly put the stick back in her underwear and left. Hetty worked each day in a cold dark office, subsisting off dry oatmeal she heated on another office's radiator. Though she kept half a billion in cash on hand at all times she lived off of $200 a week. Once she lost a 2 cent stamp in her carriage and spent the entire night looking for it. The only thing she spent money on was her beloved dog Curtis, whose name she put on her front door to confuse the taxman. Paranoid of kidnappers, she slept with a revolver tied to her wrist with a string. After Hetty died her vast fortune went to Ned and Sylvia. Sylvia built herself a mansion and mostly kept to herself. Ned gave himself the nickname Colonel, married a hooker named Mabel, and threw lavish and extravagant parties. When Ned died his share went to his sister. When Sylvia died she gave a final fuck you to her mother by donating the $90 million of the fortune that remained to charity.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hetty_Green_and_Terrier.jpg