Jay Gould — Railroad Speculator, Financial Manipulator

**Jay Gould** was the most hated man in Gilded Age America — and one of the most brilliant financial minds of the 19th century. Born in 1836 in Roxbury, New York, to a poor farming family, Gould was physically small, chronically ill with tuberculosis, and possessed of a mind so quick and devious that even his contemporaries (no strangers to sharp dealing) considered him exceptional. He started in surveying and tanning, moved into railroads in his twenties, and spent the next three decades conducting some of the most audacious financial operations in American history — often at the boundary of legality and frequently on the wrong side of it.