Business Career
Kennedy made a large fortune as a stock market and commodity investor and by investing in real estate and a wide range of industries. He never built a significant business from scratch, but his timing as both buyer and seller was usually excellent. Sometimes he made use of inside information in ways which were legal at the time but were later outlawed. Rumors claimed that Kennedy was associated with the "bear raid" that precipitated the Wall Street Crash of 1929. President Franklin D. Roosevelt later appointed Kennedy first chairman of the SEC. After Kennedy's death, gangster Frank Costello claimed an association with Kennedy for bootlegging during Prohibition. When Fortune magazine published its first list of the richest people in the United States in 1957, it placed him in the $200–400 million band ($1.65–3.31 billion today), meaning that it estimated him to be between the ninth and sixteenth richest person in the United States at that time.
Read more about this topic: Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.
Famous quotes containing the words business and/or career:
“Knighterrantry is a most chuckleheaded trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there is money in it, after all, if you have luck. Not that I would ever engage in it, as a business, for I wouldn’t. No sound and legitimate business can be established on a basis of speculation. A successful whirl in the knighterrantry line—now what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It’s just a corner in pork, that’s all.”
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“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)