What Was It Like To Be a Rich Dane

Imagine being one of the richest men in Denmark, owner of a brewery whose beer is shipped to Scotland, the Far East, and South America, wealthy enough to build essentially any house you wanted, anywhere in Copenhagen — and choosing, instead, to give almost all of it away. That isn't a hypothetical. That's simply what Jacob Christian Jacobsen, the founder of Carlsberg, actually did. Having built one of the largest and most successful breweries in the world, and having become, in the process, a genuinely wealthy man, Jacobsen quite deliberately declined to spend his fortune on a lavish personal lifestyle. Instead, he poured it into founding the Carlsberg Foundation — an institution that continues, to this day, returning the brewery's profits back into Danish science, culture, and the arts, rather than into marble staircases or imported French tapestries.