00:00In 1900, the Rothschilds loaned governments half a billion dollars, Rockefeller controlled 90%
00:06of American oil, and Queen Victoria ruled a quarter of the planet. But who truly held the
00:11most power? Bankers, industrialists, or kings? I'll give you a list, starting with the Rothschild
00:17family. We begin with the name that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories. The Rothschilds
00:22were a European Jewish banking dynasty, born in the cramped Frankfurt ghetto under Mayor Amschel
00:27Rothschild in the 18th century. His strategy was elegant and ruthless. Scatter his five sons across
00:33the great capitals of Europe and bind them by blood and ledger. By the 19th century, five branches had
00:39taken root in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples, forming a private intelligence and
00:44credit network faster than any governments. They financed kings and republics alike, bankrolled wars,
00:49laid railways across continents, and helped fund the Suez Canal itself. By 1900 their golden age had
00:55dimmed, eclipsed by the rise of faceless joint stock banks, yet their power was far from spent.
01:00Between 1895 and 1907, they still loaned nearly half a billion dollars to European governments,
01:07a fortune almost beyond comprehension. The British Chancellor David Lloyd George called Nathan
01:11Mayor Rothschild, one of the most powerful men in Britain. Their weapon was the bond market,
01:16and they wielded it like a scepter, the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Windsor. If the Rothschilds
01:21moved money, this family commanded the map. Queen Victoria, who died in January 1901,
01:26presided over the British Empire at its absolute territorial summit, a domain swallowing roughly a
01:31quarter of all the land on Earth. The bloodline carried the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha name, brought
01:36into the house by her beloved Prince Albert. When she died, her son Edward VII inherited not just a
01:42throne, but a planet-spanning machine of power. An empire held together by the unrivaled Royal Navy,
01:47by oceanic trade routes thick with merchant ships, and by the plundered wealth of distant colonies,
01:52stretching from India to Africa to the Pacific. But the family's true genius was matrimonial.
01:56Through a web of strategic marriages, Victoria's descendants came to sit on the thrones of Germany
02:02and Russia, earning her the title, the Grandmother of Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm was her grandson,
02:07the Russian Tsarina was her granddaughter.
02:10The Rockefeller Family
02:11Across the Atlantic, a new species of monarch was rising, one crowned not by God or bloodline,
02:18but by oil. John D. Rockefeller, born in 1839 to modest means, forged standard oil into the most
02:26ruthless and complete monopoly America had ever witnessed. By the early 1900s, his company
02:31controlled roughly 90% of all U.S. refining, a stranglehold he achieved through secret railroad
02:37rebates, predatory pricing and the quiet, relentless absorption of every rival foolish enough to resist.
02:43He drove the price of kerosene down so low that he lit the lamps of an entire nation,
02:48even as he crushed his competitors beneath him. Though Rockefeller had stepped back from the daily
02:52grind of operations by this point, he remained the colossal shareholder, the silent architect behind
02:57the whole apparatus. His empire ran from the wellhead to the refinery to the pump, a model of vertical
03:02integration so total, it terrified the public. The government would finally shatter standard oil
03:07into pieces in 1911. But the fortune endured, funding universities, medicine, and a dynasty
03:13whose influence would echo through American business and politics for a century.
03:17The House of Hohenzollern
03:18Back in Europe, the most dangerous man of the age wore a withered arm and a magnificent upturned
03:23mustache. The Hohenzollerns ruled Prussia, and after the unification of 1871,
03:29the thunderous new German empire that dominated the heart of the continent.
03:33At its head stood Kaiser Wilhelm II, impulsive, brilliant, theatrical, and consumed by a bitter
03:39jealousy of his British cousins and their gleaming navy. Around 1900, Germany was industrializing at a
03:45furious, almost frightening pace, its factories and steelworks roaring past those of its neighbors.
03:51Wilhelm hungered to challenge Britain on the one stage he believed truly mattered, the open sea.
03:55His ambitious Tirpitz plan launched a colossal naval buildup, igniting an arms race that would
04:01help drag the entire continent toward catastrophe. He chased colonies in Africa and Asia, demanded a
04:07place in the sun, and meddled restlessly and clumsily in European diplomacy. His volatile blend of
04:12bombast and genuine modernization defined the era, but the gamble failed spectacularly.
04:18The J.P. Morgan Family
04:19If Rockefeller owned oil, this man owned the very machinery of American capitalism itself.
04:25J.P. Morgan, with his fierce, piercing eyes and famously ruined nose, was the financier whom bankers
04:32themselves answered to, a one-man central bank in an age before one existed. In 1901, he orchestrated
04:38the birth of U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation on earth, by swallowing Andrew Carnegie's
04:43empire whole in a single staggering transaction. His power reached its mythic height in the panic of
04:491907, when the financial system teetered on the edge of total collapse. It was Morgan, not the
04:54government, who summoned the nation's frightened bankers, locked them in the library of his mansion,
04:59and refused to let them leave until they agreed to pool their money and save the system. He financed
05:03railroads across the continent, conjured General Electric into existence, and assembled international
05:08harvester. Reformers warned darkly of a money trust, a single hand throttling the flow of all American
05:15capital. The House of Romanov. Now we turn east across the steppe to the vastest empire of them
05:21all, and the family is doomed to lose every inch of it. The Romanovs had ruled Russia for three
05:27centuries by the time Tsar Nicholas II ascended the throne in 1894. He commanded a realm of staggering,
05:34almost incomprehensible scale, oceans of farmland, mountains stuffed with minerals, and a sea of more
05:40than a hundred million human souls. Yet he governed this colossus like a medieval relic clinging to
05:45absolute autocracy while the modern world surged forward without him. Around 1900, the strains of
05:51rapid industrialization, the misery of the peasantry, and his own stubborn refusal to reform were quietly
05:56cracking the foundations of his throne. A humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War
06:01detonated the Revolution of 1905, a thunderous warning he chose not to heed. Russia played its great
06:07part in the imperial chess match known as the Great Game, dreaming of dominance across Asia.
06:12But its entry into the First World War proved fatal. By 1918, Nicholas and his entire family lay
06:18dead in a cellar, and three centuries of Romanov rule ended in blood.
06:22The Vanderbilt Family. Some dynasties built power quietly. This one wore it like a crown of diamonds.
06:28The Vanderbilt fortune began with Cornelius, the Commodore, a blunt, profane, and brutal genius who
06:34first conquered American shipping and then seized the railroads. By 1900, his heirs sat atop the
06:40gilded peak of American high society, undisputed masters of the New York Central, and lords of an
06:45age defined by glittering excess. They raised palatial mansions along Fifth Avenue. Vast French
06:51chateaux dropped incongruously onto Manhattan, and they summered in so-called cottages at Newport,
06:56sprawling marble palaces each more outrageously extravagant than the last.
07:00William Kissam Vanderbilt and his kin steered the transportation empire that stitched the
07:05continent together, iron arteries pumping commerce and passengers from coast to coast.
07:10Their balls, their weddings, and their feuds set the very rules of polite society.
07:14Yet unlike the relentless builders Rockefeller and Carnegie, the Vanderbilts were ultimately
07:19spenders, and their once unimaginable wealth would slowly, steadily evaporate across the
07:24generations until little but the name remained.
07:27The House of Habsburg, in the heart of Europe ruled a dynasty older than living memory,
07:33presiding over a beautiful and ultimately impossible empire. The Habsburgs had reigned
07:37for centuries, and by 1900 the immense burden fell on the stooped, aged shoulders of Emperor
07:43Franz Joseph I, who had sat upon the throne since the revolutionary year of 1848. His was the dual
07:50monarchy of Austria-Hungary, an intricate patchwork of a dozen nations, languages, and ancient grievances,
07:56held together by the careful machinery of the 1,867 Compromise.
08:02Franz Joseph played the role of grand and weary balancer, working to hold the volatile
08:07Balkans in check and to maintain his thread in Europe's hopelessly tangled web of alliances.
08:11But the empire was being strained toward its breaking point, pulled apart by the rising
08:16fever of nationalism within its own borders, and squeezed from without by the surging might
08:20of Germany and Russia. It was a magnificent, golden twilight.
08:24After the cataclysm of the First World War, in 1918, the entire empire dissolved into its
08:29constituent nations, and the ancient family scattered to the winds.
08:33The Carnegie family returned now to America, to a man who clawed his way up from absolute
08:38poverty to become the undisputed king of steel. Andrew Carnegie arrived on these shores a penniless
08:44Scottish immigrant, a child of the bobbin mill, and built Carnegie Steel into the single
08:48dominant force in American industrial production. He mastered the revolutionary Bessemer process,
08:53and waged a relentless, almost obsessive war on cost, integrating every stage of manufacture
08:59from the iron ore in the ground to the finished beam. His steel became the literal skeleton of
09:04the modern world. The bones of soaring skyscrapers, the spine of the transcontinental railroads,
09:09the armored hulls of warships. Then in 1901, he sold his entire empire to J.P. Morgan,
09:15for roughly $480 million, forging U.S. steel, and crowning himself one of the richest men who
09:21had ever lived. And then he did something genuinely remarkable. He set out to give nearly all of it
09:26away. The DuPont family, we end with a family whose power was quieter, darker, and explosive,
09:32in the most literal sense imaginable. The DuPonts traced their American story to 1802,
09:39when Eleuther Irinae DuPont, a refugee of the French Revolution, founded a gunpowder mill on
09:45the banks of the Brandywine River in Delaware. For generations, the family kept the firm clutched
09:49tightly within its own bloodline, passing control from father to son to cousin. By 1900, they had
09:55become the dominant supplier of gunpowder, dynamite, and smokeless powder in the entire United States,
10:01arming the miners who blasted open the mountains, the railroad crews who tore tunnels through solid rock,
10:06and the armies that would very soon need them in unimaginable quantities. Innovators like
10:10Lamette DuPont pushed the volatile science of explosives ever forward.
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