There is a running joke in McLean, Virginia, that the most secretive organization headquartered in that Washington suburb is not the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a candy and pet food company. The building at 6885...
There is a running joke in McLean, Virginia, that the most secretive organization headquartered in that Washington suburb is not the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a candy and pet food company. The building at 6885 Elm Street carries no sign announcing that it is the global headquarters of a corporation with more than $50 billion in annual sales. The only posted message is a warning that the property is private (Washingtonian).
That building belongs to Mars, Incorporated, maker of M&M's, Snickers, Pedigree, Whiskas, and Wrigley's gum. It is one of the largest privately held companies on earth, it employs more than 140,000 people, and after more than a century it remains 100 percent owned by one family, now in its fourth generation (Mars, Our History; Mars family, Wikipedia).
Most fortunes this size come with a public face. This one was built on the opposite bet: that a family which says almost nothing, sells no shares, and writes its rules down can outlast every louder competitor. The story of how they got there is worth telling slowly, because the mechanics inside it are available to families with no factory and no fortune at all.
Frank C. Mars was born in Minnesota, in Pope County, and learned to hand-dip chocolate from his mother, Elva (Mars, Our History). His early business attempts failed more than once. The founding date the company itself uses is 1911, when Frank and his wife Ethel began making and selling buttercream candies from their kitchen in Tacoma, Washington (Mars, Our History).
The turn came in 1923 with the Milky Way bar, a candy inspired by a conversation about chocolate malted milk between Frank and his son Forrest (Forrest Mars Sr., Wikipedia). Snickers followed in 1930. The company was suddenly one of the largest candy makers in America, and the family had its first taste of the problem that ends most family firms: two capable generations in the same room, disagreeing.
In 1932, after a quarrel with his father, Forrest Mars Sr. left the American business. He took a payout of $50,000 and the foreign rights to Milky Way, and moved to England, where he built his own company, creating the Mars bar and Maltesers (Forrest Mars Sr., Wikipedia). In 1940 he formed a partnership with Bruce Murrie, son of a Hershey executive, and in 1941 began producing a sugar-shelled chocolate that would not melt in a soldier's pocket: M&M's, supplied primarily to the American military during the war. In 1949 Forrest bought Murrie out for $1 million and owned the product completely (Forrest Mars Sr., Wikipedia).
Frank had died back in 1934. For three decades the family enterprise existed as two separate empires, the father's American company and the exiled son's international one. In 1964 Forrest finally merged them and took control of the combined Mars, Incorporated (Forrest Mars Sr., Wikipedia). The rupture of 1932 had healed into something larger than either half.
What Forrest did next matters more to ordinary families than anything he did with chocolate.
As early as 1947 he had written that the objective of the company was to create a mutuality of benefits for a broad range of different groups: consumers, distributors, competitors, suppliers, employees, and shareholders (Gail Golden Consulting). Over time that thinking was codified into what the company calls the Five Principles: Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency, and Freedom (Mars, The Five Principles).
Four of the five read like good corporate hygiene. The fifth is the strategic one. Freedom, in the Mars formulation, means the company needs financial freedom to make its own decisions, unrestricted by the motivations of others. In practice that principle has meant two standing commitments: stay private, and stay wary of debt. As the company's own materials put it, being private frees Mars to work on a longer timeline than publicly traded companies can (Mars, The Five Principles; CSP Daily News).
You can watch the principle operate in the company's biggest decisions. In 2008 Mars bought the Wrigley chewing gum company for $23 billion, and because it would not sell shares to the public, it took financing from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway to close the deal. Then, in 2016, it bought Buffett out and returned to full ownership (Just Food). Even Warren Buffett was treated as a temporary guest in the ownership structure. In 2024 Mars agreed to buy snack maker Kellanova for roughly $36 billion, the biggest deal of that year, and completed it in late 2025, still without a single public share (CNBC; Just Food).
The point is not the size of the checks. The point is that a sentence written down decades earlier, "we need freedom to shape our future," kept deciding things long after its author died in 1999. That is what a principle is for. Not decoration. Jurisdiction.
The other Mars discipline is the one outsiders find strangest: the family is almost invisible.
Forrest Sr. reportedly enforced a rule of public silence after a 1966 magazine profile enraged him, and the habit became a family tradition (Growth List). His children Jacqueline and John Mars, each among the richest people in the world, have never given a sit-down television interview (Washingtonian). Inside the company, executives were taught that loose lips produce pink slips, and even travel plans were treated as confidential (Washingtonian). Fortune once described Mars as a place of legendary secrecy that simply declined the entire apparatus of corporate celebrity (Fortune).
It is tempting to read this as eccentricity. It is better read as strategy. A family that does not perform its wealth attracts fewer lawsuits, fewer schemers, fewer kidnapping risks, fewer resentments, and fewer children who confuse being rich with being finished. Silence also protects the company itself: competitors of Mars have spent a century guessing at numbers that public rivals are forced to print every quarter. And privacy compounds internally too. A family that only talks to itself about money develops its own vocabulary, its own case law, its own patience. The Mars family's ownership passed through the founder's kitchen, a father-son rupture, a war, a merger, and four generations of heirs, and through all of it the family's arguments stayed inside the walls (Mars family, Wikipedia).
By 2023 the quiet machine was generating over $50 billion a year, with 59 percent of revenue coming from pet care, a business the family entered decades ago precisely because it was free to ignore analysts who wanted it to stay a candy company (Grokipedia, Mars family; Mars, About).
Strip away the billions and three moves remain, each executable at any scale.
One: treat privacy as an asset with a return. You do not need a fortune to practice financial discretion; you need a rule. Decide as a household what is discussed outside the family about money: nothing specific, ever. No land sizes, no salaries, no windfalls, no plans. This is not paranoia. Visible money changes how relatives ask, how neighbors price things, how thieves choose targets, and how your own children behave. The Mars family ran a multibillion enterprise from an unmarked building. Your version is simpler: let your assets be discovered by your heirs in a document, not by your village in a boast.
Two: write your principles down, then let them outrank your moods. The Five Principles work at Mars because they are used in actual decisions, including $23 billion and $36 billion ones. Most family value statements fail because they are written once and consulted never. Write five sentences that state what your family will always do and never do with money. Then do the harder thing: the next time a real decision arrives, a loan request, a land sale, a school choice, read the sentences out loud before deciding, and let them win when they conflict with what you feel like doing. A principle that has never overruled you is a slogan.
Three: choose reinvestment over extraction, and buy back your freedom when you must borrow it. Mars stayed whole because generation after generation left the money in the machine, and when outside capital was unavoidable, as with Berkshire in 2008, the family treated it as a bridge and repurchased full ownership in 2016 (Just Food). The family version: when the business or the land produces a surplus, the default destination is back into the asset, not into lifestyle. And when you do borrow, or take in a partner, write the exit before you sign the entry: the date and mechanism by which the family returns to full ownership. Debt and dilution are tools. Permanent debt and permanent dilution are leaks.
Frank Mars started in a kitchen with recipes from his mother. Four generations later the family owns, entirely and quietly, one of the largest companies in the world, and the instrument of that endurance was not a secret product. It was a written creed, applied with embarrassing consistency, by people who felt no need to be seen.
Here is the decision in front of you. Will you write your family's five principles this month, on one page, in words a twelve-year-old can repeat, and then submit your next real financial decision to them? If the honest answer is that your family has no written principles, only habits, then you already know what is currently governing your money: whoever in the family argues loudest on the day. The Mars family replaced that ruler a hundred years ago. You can replace it by Friday.