--- description: Steelmakers and financiers had a first-rate mystery to tussle with last week. Veteran Steelman Charles Michael Schwab once made $2,000,000 a year as U.S. Steel's first president. Then he bought... title: Bankrupt Millionaire image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [U.S.](/section/us/) # Bankrupt Millionaire by [TIME](/author/time/) May 26, 1941 4:00 AM CUT by [TIME](/author/time/) May 26, 1941 4:00 AM CUT Steelmakers and financiers had a first-rate mystery to tussle with last week. Veteran Steelman Charles Michael Schwab once made $2,000,000 a year as U.S. Steel’s first president. Then he bought Bethlehem, built its assets from $15,000,000 to $719,760,397\. Even in his declining years he got $250,000 a year as Bethlehem’s chairman. Yet when Charles Schwab died two years ago, at 77, he was broke. A preliminary accounting of his New York estate filed last March listed debts of $2,262,280 (chiefly to banks), assets of only $353,810\. Last week a report on his Pennsylvania estate listed $300,000 in debts, only $51,094 in assets. Among the Pennsylvania assets were an old automobile sold at an administrator’s sale for $20, carpenter’s tools sold for $4. Even after allowing for his charities (including a $2,000,000 endowment for Pennsylvania’s Saint Francis College) and his expensive tastes, it was still hard to figure what had happened to his fortune. Most likely guess: it disappeared in the stockmarket crashes of 1929 and 1937\. Whatever the reason, Charles Schwab had left no more to his heirs than if he had kept working at the $1-a-day job in which he entered the steel business in 1881. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6765031/bankrupt-millionaire/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6765031/bankrupt-millionaire/"},"headline":"Bankrupt Millionaire","datePublished":"1941-05-26T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-28T18:34:36.544Z","description":"Steelmakers and financiers had a first-rate mystery to tussle with last week. Veteran Steelman Charles Michael Schwab once made $2,000,000 a year as U.S. Steel's first president. Then he bought...","url":"https://time.com/archive/6765031/bankrupt-millionaire/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME","url":"https://time.com/author/time/"}],"articleSection":"U.S.","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/us/","name":"U.S."}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6765031/bankrupt-millionaire/","name":"Bankrupt Millionaire"}}]}] ```