Hugo Stinnes

Hugo Stinnes was a German industrialist who lived from February 12, 1870 to April 10, 1924 and built one of the largest industrial combines in German history by linking coal mining directly to electricity generation. He joined the electricity utility Rheinisch-Westfalisches Elektrizitatswerk, RWE, in 1898, and pursued a strategy of using coal from his own mines to raise steam that drove turbines for power generation, integrating fuel supply and electricity production inside one business empire. At its peak his conglomerate controlled roughly fifteen to twenty percent of the entire German economy and, by his death, held some 4,500 companies and 3,000 manufacturing plants, though the empire largely collapsed within a year of his death in the disorder of the Weimar economy. Parts of it survived independently, including Stinnes AG, Hugo Stinnes Schiffahrt and RWE itself, which grew into one of Germany's largest energy suppliers. Stinnes also sat in the German Reichstag from 1920 until his death and became known during the hyperinflation of the early 1920s as the Inflation King for the way his heavily leveraged businesses profited as the currency collapsed.