Hetty Green made her fortune in the 1800s through pure financial ruthlessness—she was essentially a hedge fund manager before hedge funds existed, lending money at crushing rates during panics and buying up distressed assets. But she was capped by the era's liquidity constraints; there were only so many railroads to buy and bonds to trade. Her wealth compounded in a relatively thin market where a single person could dominate. Warren Buffett entered the game in the 1950s when American industrial capacity was exploding post-WWII, and he did something Hetty couldn't: he bought entire operating businesses and let them compound for 70 years. Berkshire Hathaway isn't just a portfolio—it's a conglomerate that owns See's Candies, GEICO, Apple stock, and dozens of other cash-generating machines.

The real multiplier for Buffett was leverage and scale that simply didn't exist in Hetty's era. He could borrow money at 2% to buy businesses earning 15% returns, then reinvest the profits without touching them. Hetty had to hoard cash because there was no reliable way to deploy billions across diversified assets. Buffett also benefited from the S&P 500's roughly 10% annual returns over his lifetime—he rode the wave of American economic growth rather than just exploiting market inefficiencies. By the time he hit peak earning years in the 1980s-2000s, he was operating at a scale where a single percentage point of outperformance on billions generates more wealth than Hetty accumulated in her entire life.

But here's the darkest part of the comparison: Hetty's obsessive frugality (the amputated leg, the cold oatmeal) was actually about control and paranoia—she couldn't spend because she didn't trust the world. Buffett's frugality is almost philosophical; he spends $3.17 on breakfast and lives in a $31,500 house because he genuinely doesn't care about consumption. That's not deprivation—that's freedom. Hetty got wealthy by denying herself and others; Buffett got wealthy by simply compounding and letting time do the work. He's 27 times richer not because he's 27 times smarter, but because he had better tools, better timing, and 70 years of uninterrupted compounding in a growing economy.