How A Poor Chicago Fire Survivor Built Gillette

The brand is worth $57 billion today. Its founder died in a bathrobe — his estate barely covered his debts. How does a man build the most recognized grooming product on earth and lose everything before the world even notices? Look — King Camp Gillette lost his home at sixteen in the Great Chicago Fire. For twenty years he rode trains across America selling other men's inventions. One conversation with a bottle-cap maker changed everything. He chased a razor that MIT professors called physically impossible — for six brutal years, while his savings disappeared and his wife stopped asking questions. Then one quiet engineer said three words: "I can make this." What followed was an explosion — from 51 blades sold in year one to twelve million the next. The U.S. Army put his razor in the hands of three and a half million soldiers. His face became the most printed advertisement on the planet. But here is the part nobody tells you: the man who built capitalism's sharpest machine spent every night writing books about destroying capitalism forever. He offered a U.S. president one million dollars to lead his socialist utopia. Nobody listened. Unknown Fortunes — where we uncover the billionaires nobody talks about. No fame. Just fortune. 00:00 - The Face You Already Know 02:30 - A City on Fire 05:30 - The Advice That Started Everything 09:00 - Six Years of "Impossible" 13:00 - The Blade That Conquered the World 16:30 - The Dream That Burned Him Twice ▶ Missed our last episode? Watch how Prajogo Pangestu (pra-JO-go pan-GES-too) went from a minivan driver to a $43B invisible empire:    • The $43 Billion Man With Only ONE Known Ph...   🔔 Subscribe for regular new episodes.