The astor family biography interview

Astor Place in New York's Greenwich Village is named for John Jacob Astor, America's first multi-millionaire.  "John Jacob Astor and then his son, for generations, they were just buying up parcels here and there, and then large tracts of land further north," said Anderson Cooper.

Astor died in with one regret: He wished he had bought more real estate.

"There's a famous quote, you know, 'Had I to do it over again, I would have, you know, put every nickel I had in New York real estate,'" Cooper said.

Astor had made his money through the bloody and brutal beaver fur trade.

"He saw the huge markups that beaver fur could get – you know, %, %, % markups," Cooper said. "And John Jacob Astor went out into the wilderness and started trading with Indigenous populations."

By , his fur trading company was the largest business enterprise in the United States.

And Astor was an astonishingly ruthless businessman, according to Cooper's new book, co-written with historian Katheri