A friend of Andrew Carnegie, with whom he was often compared, at the end of the 19th century he controlled an effective monopoly on steel and iron resources within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and had by the 1890s acquired one of the largest fortunes in the world.

In 1938, to escape Nazi racial laws and to be reclassified as half Jewish, his descendants claimed that Herman Christian was not the son of Moses Meyer Wittgenstein but rather the illegitimate offspring of a prince of the House of Waldeck.

[7] Monk writes, "He managed nevertheless to maintain himself for over two years by working as a waiter, a saloon musician, a bartender and a teacher (of the violin, the horn, mathematics, German and anything else he could think of)."

After a year of education and an apprenticeship, Karl took the job of a draughtsman on the construction of a rolling mill in Bohemia, a post offered to him by Paul Kupelwieser, the brother of his brother-in-law.

In 1898, he retired from his posts and transferred much of his wealth to foreign equities, principally in the United States which protected the Wittgenstein family from the inflation in Vienna after the First World War.