Empire Builder

The following is a quote from an introduction by Robert Ludlum for an omnibus edition printed in 1989. It contained "The Holocroft Covenant," "The Matarese Circle," and "The Bourne Identity." The quote is on page xii and it is in reference to the origin of the Trilateral Commission.

"Suppose such elections were not necessary; suppose the genesis of such an organization was not in the 1970s but, instead, in the 1870s - and it was secret. Suppose, rather than a renowned banker from a prominent family constantly in the media spotlight, the creator of this organization was a distant visionary, isolated from the world on, say, an island, a huge landmass of an island - say, Corsica. That visionary would have to be a great padrone, an empire builder who looked far beyond his own life span in the tradition of the true nineteenth-century barons of industry. He would be the founder of an infrastructural global dynasty that would shape the financial centers of the world for its own interests in ways never dreamed of by the Rothschilds in Europe. Whoever controls a government's economy ultimately controls the government."

The quote really makes me wonder what such a person is like and how they came about.