It's 1907 and Wall Street is in complete meltdown.

Banks are failing, millionaires are jumping from windows, and even J.P. Morgan himself is scrambling to save the entire financial system.

But while the most powerful men in America are panicking, there's one person sitting calmly at a simple desk in a bank lobby surrounded by stacks of cash.

She's wearing the same black dress she's worn for years and she's about to single-handedly

prevent the collapse of the American economy.

Her name, Hetty Green.

And she's about to lend over $6 million to save banks, businesses, and lives, all while

charging fair interest rates when she could have demanded anything she wanted.

You've probably never heard of her.

And that's because history buried the story of America's first female Wall Street Titan,

the woman who turned a childhood of rejection into a financial empire that

would make even today's billionaires jealous. She bought entire towns, faced down a railroad

baron with a loaded gun, and accumulated wealth using strategies so ahead of their time that

Warren Buffett is still using them today. So why don't we know her name?

Because Hetty Green committed the ultimate sin in the gilded age. She was a woman who refused to

apologize for being smarter than every man in the room.

Welcome to the Knowledge Project.

I'm your host, Shane Parrish.

In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best

for other people have already figured out.

Hedy Green died in 1916 worth about $100 million.

That's over $2.5 billion in today's money. And she built this fortune in an

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