How Did Joseph Pulitzer Turn $5,000 Into $30,000?

David Senra, reading James McGrath Morris, says Joseph Pulitzer borrowed about $5,000 to buy into a St. Louis newspaper at 25, and a year later the owners bought him out for about $30,000, six times the original stake.

Pulitzer had already worked on the staff for five years and was its most valuable member, on the job 16 hours a day. In his own account, the owners thought he was necessary to the paper and would probably have done the same thing for any other man who worked 16 hours a day. Seven years after he first read the paper while looking for work in St. Louis, he became an American newspaper publisher. He did not have the $5,000, so he went into debt. Buying into the newspaper was one of the best decisions he ever made, because the following year he fell out with his two mentors. The editorial office had grown too small for the three men, and they offered to buy him out. The price they proposed came from the desire to be free of him. He walked away with about $30,000 in a single year, when the average skilled worker made $600 a year.