Thread about Napoleon Hill, the most influential business writer of all time. People know him from his best-seller "Think and Grow Rich", based on a conversation with successful men like Andrew Carnegie... The problem? These conversations never happened.1/

The truth about Napoleon Hill is far darker. He:
Ran a scam college that functioned as a pyramid scheme.
Got arrested for selling unlicensed securities.
Faked being a lawyer.
Claimed to have facilitated the armistice with the Germans in WWI
2/

He claimed to advise FDR and to coin the phrase "we have nothing to fear but fear itself"
He claims he wrote many of the fireside chats.

All the records of his achievements were burned in a fire, so there's no evidence of this of course... 3/

And the biggest lie of all, that Andrew Carnegie mentored him, didn't start making the rounds until AFTER Carnegie died and couldn't deny it.

Today, millions have been wrongfully persuaded that Carnegie was some wishful thinking man who talked like a self-help coach. 4/

The reality can be seen in Carnegie's own writings where he is a pragmatic businessman who was a firm believer in capitalism despite the inevitable inequity that it brings... Think and Grow Rich was simply the ramblings of a failed con-man who was broke most of his life. 5/

Hilariously, Hill was called out multiple times for being a fraud, for example, here in an old magazine article "Pointing the Way To Get Rich Land", where the writer calls Hill's bogus college laughably bad.

Hill was something of a pioneer in charlatanism, he started the aggressive follow-up mail practice of offering "reduced prices" to people who didn't respond to his first offer.