I’ve been taking my own advice via John Adams by traveling a bit with family this week, but I didn’t want it to pass without comment, because it marks the date, 107 years ago, that Hetty Green departed the bounds of this Earth.

Don’t know her? I’m sure some readers will prove to be exceptions, but frankly it’s part of the point. During America’s Gilded Age, from say sometime in the 1870s or so to 1900, Hetty Green was known as the wealthiest woman in America.

Born Henrietta Howland Robinson, she came from a family that had “made millions with their whaling fleet and shipping interests” in New Bedford, Massachusetts, according to a biographer. So, she started out with an enormous head start in life, inheriting the modern equivalent of about $100 million.

She grew her fortune aggressively through investments to what in 2023 would be about $2.5 billion—potentially even more, because she was aggressive and effective at hiding her ownership of property to avoid tax.

Hetty was quite famous in her time. Three points stand out:

1. First, she increased her fortune purely by investing, not by building a business or an industry herself. One fairly recently account calls her the “cantankerous grandmother” of value investing.
2. Second, she was a woman accumulating all this money during a time when women couldn’t vote, and before (in many cases) they could even own property in their own names.
3. Third, she was known for her financial acumen, but probably even more so for her reputation for being incredibly thrifty, to the point of discomfort.

Popularly reported examples of her thriftiness:

• Refusing to heat her apartments in New York City;
• Eating only cold food to avoid paying for cooking fuel;
• Telling her maids only to clean the dirtiest parts of her clothing so as to reduce costs;
• Trying to get a medical society for the poor to treat her son’s illness for free; and
• Living with a painful hernia because she refused to pay for an operation to treat it.

Of course, Green’s reputation and the fact that she was a woman might not be unrelated — meaning I can easily see it being portrayed in the press that way because of her sex. Unfortunately, the newspaper accounts are mostly what we have to go on.

“Not so different from the modern Warren Buffett,” wrote Green’s biographer and defender, Janet Wallach, in 2013, pointing out that he’s legendarily frugal in his personal life—living in the same home for decades. “But as much as the press smiles at Buffett’s habits, they smirked at Hetty’s behavior.”

“Just because I dress plainly and do not spend a fortune on my gowns, they say I am cranky or insane,” Green complained at one point.

Anyway, it stuck. These things happen. She was even named “The World’s Greatest Miser” by the Guinness Book of World Records—although she was more popularly known as “the Witch of Wall Street.”

Hetty married a fellow millionaire in 1867, Edward Green (requiring him to sign a prenup), and they had two children. They separated eventually — although never actually divorced, and reportedly reconciled to some degree in latter years.

She died after a series of strokes at age 82, leaving her wealth divided between her two children, who reportedly enjoyed being rich more than she did. Neither of them had children or other heirs of their own, however, and ultimately most of the Green fortune wound up going to charity.

Just like that, she was gone — forgotten, I suppose, except for occasional email newsletter mentions and the like. Obviously, I’m not exactly holding her up as a role model here—maybe more of a cautionary tale and a bit of history to mention the next time you're at a cocktail party and need a conversation starter.

I’m all for building wealth, believe you me. But it’s a sad story when people don’t remember there’s a lot more to life!

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7 things worth knowing today

• Relevant, thematically: Author Andre Dubus III, on what happened when he visited New York with family, shortly after he'd gone from being a struggling 40-year-old writer with $300 in his bank account and a family, to a multimillionaire overnight, with the success of his 1999 novel, House of Sand and Fog. (New Yorker)
• Elon Musk says people who do not have children have "little stake in the future" and suggests that they should lose the right to vote, in a series of tweets. (Jezebel)
• Speaking of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg is set to launch is rival Twitter-style app this week. "Threads, an Instagram app", is now available for pre-order in app stores in the United States, with a message saying it is "expected" this Thursday. (AFP)
• Maternal mortality rates (death during pregnancy or up to a year afterward) have doubled in the U.S. over the last two decades a study in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds. Deaths among Black mothers were highest, and Southern states had the highest maternal death rates across all race and ethnicity groups. (BBC)
• The Kremlin this week held the door open for contacts with the U.S. regarding a possible prisoner exchange that could involve jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, but reaffirmed that such talks must be held out of the public eye. The U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Lynne Tracy, was allowed to visit Gershkovich for the first time since April. (ABC News)
• A leader in the U.S. white nationalist movement wound up taking the drug MDMA as part of a scientific study. He says the revelations he had on the drug took him from being a regional leader of a notorious group called Identity Evropa, to completely reversing his personal world view. "MDMA does not seem to be able to magically rid people of prejudice, bigotry, or hate on its own. But some researchers have begun to wonder if it could be an effective tool for pushing people who are already somehow primed to reconsider their ideology toward a new way of seeing things." (BBC)
• Where are the flying cars? Oh, here: the FAA has certified for testing the "Model A, a vehicle/aircraft produced by Alef Automotive, and the first flying vehicle that is drivable on public roads and able to park like a normal car. It has vertical takeoff and landing capabilities, can carry two occupants and will have a road-range of 200 miles and a flying range of 110 miles. (CNN)

Thanks for reading. If today's story sounds familiar to you, then you rock! It means you've been reading this newsletter for more than three years; I'm traveling this week and so I adapted today's main story (but not the 7 things) from something I wrote several years ago. Photo: Unsplash. See you bright and early tomorrow!