Unknown author · Public domain

Born Mark Goldmann in Bavaria, he immigrated to America in 1848, working first as a peddler and then a Philadelphia clothing merchant before relocating to New York in 1869 and hanging a shingle on Pine Street as a broker of commercial paper, buying merchants' IOUs for cash and reselling them to banks. He brought his son-in-law Samuel Sachs into the business in 1882; the firm they built together became Goldman Sachs, now one of the world's largest investment banks — a legacy of practical, unglamorous dealmaking rather than any single dramatic coup.