The Gilded Age Never Ended - It Just Learned Technology
My obsession with past and modern industrialists and how they shaped the world we live in.
In the late nineteenth century, New York moved to the rhythm of rail schedules along with the smoke and high rise buildings made of steel.
Steel screamed, steam hissed, and fortunes were made.
Men like Cornelius Vanderbilt didn’t just own companies - they owned the lifestyle of middle and lower class. If goods moved, they moved through him. If cities grew, they grew because he decided to build a depot or a junction within them.
In Pennsylvania, John D. Rockefeller was doing something quieter, and far more effective. He didn’t shout. He didn’t speculate. He standardized. He integrated. He absorbed. Barrel by barrel, refinery by refinery, he turned kerosene business into oil refinery and into mass production.
Meanwhile, Andrew Carnegie perfected steel, built bridges across Mississippi river and influenced high-rises in New York. His partner Henry Frick handled the uglier side of the business: labor, pressure, control. Progress, after all, has always needed someone willing to be disliked.
And there was John Jacob Astor, who understood the real estate: land outlives cycles. Empires rise and fall, but geography compounds forever.
This was the original Gilded Age - loud and visible, full of high-society parties and appearances. Wealth announced itself in marble libraries and private rail cars. Power wore top hats.
Then the century turned. The costumes changed. Mrs. Vanderbilt no longer leads the society. Neither does Mrs. Astor. Structure, however, did not.
Today, no one waits for trains. They wait for servers to respond.
Elon Musk does not own railroads, but he controls pathways just as critical - energy grids, satellites, manufacturing scale, narratives about the future itself. He doesn’t move steel across states, though he runs five businesses in a single day.
Jeff Bezos didn’t drill oil, but he mastered distribution with Rockefeller’s precision. Warehouses replaced oil refineries. Logistics replaced pipelines. Dominance arrived the same way it always has - slowly, then completely.
Others followed. Platforms replaced factories. Data replaced land. Network effects replaced exclusivity contracts. But if Vanderbilt walked into a modern boardroom, he would recognize the logic immediately. Control the infrastructure. Let others compete on top of it.
The tools evolved. The playbook did not.
What makes this Gilded Age harder to see is its politeness.
There are no smoke-filled rooms. No visible monopolies - only “ecosystems.” No trusts, just “too-big-to-fail businesses.”
Power today hides behind interfaces and compliance language. Wealth doesn’t shout, it compounds quietly. A spreadsheet now does what a railroad once did: decide who gets access and who waits at the station.
And just like before, regulation hasn’t abolished power. It has refined it.
The interesting part of living through a Gilded Age is that it never feels historical. It feels normal.
People in 1895 didn’t think they were living inside an era that textbooks would later dissect. They thought they were watching progress, innovation and opportunity. And they weren’t wrong.
Today’s billionaires aren’t villains, any more than Carnegie, Jay Gould or Rockefeller were cartoon monsters. While they raced in to elect William Mckinley to the presidency by buying newspapers and influencing articles, we can see exact same thing happening today - except in social media terms.
The Gilded Age didn’t end. It just became bit more private and more influential. Play by their rules, until you are big enough to make your own.