Making Money follows four college friends who arrive in New York with the same bright, naïve objective-get rich-and radically different ideas about what "getting rich" should cost them. The novel centers on Thomas Beauchamp Crocker, nicknamed "Bojo," who steps into Wall Street and discovers that speculation can feel like destiny, success can be more corrupting than failure, and the city's social machinery rewards a certain kind of emptiness dressed up as confidence. Owen Johnson writes the financial district as a moral laboratory, where money is less a possession than a pressure that reveals character.