What the Vanderbilt Fortune Forgot
There is a myth that sits underneath most first-generation wealth building, so deep that it is rarely said out loud. It goes like this: the problem is size. If I can just build a big enough pile, my...
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There is a myth that sits underneath most first-generation wealth building, so deep that it is rarely said out loud. It goes like this: the problem is size. If I can just build a big enough pile, my...
Two friends meet for a beer, somewhere in the American Midwest, sometime in the early 2000s. Call them Joe and Dan. Their fathers were both successful business owners. Both sons went to work for...
In January 2015, a man named Dominic Gardenia sat in his office in Springfield, Missouri, holding the largest offer of his life and feeling something close to grief. A national chain had come for the...
In Ireland, they say, "Clogs to clogs in three generations." In Italy, "Stable to stars to stable" in the same time frame. In Japan, "The third generation ruins the house." The Chinese proverb is,...
Somewhere in the middle of a book written for American families worth thirty million dollars and up, in a chapter on family governance thick with constitutions, bylaws, and boards, an Alaskan judge...
Joe Robbie did what the advice columns tell every responsible person to do. He made a plan. Before his death in 1990, the one-time owner of the Miami Dolphins football team and the stadium the team...
Somewhere in America, a founder sold the business he had spent his life building, banked the money, and woke up the next morning with nothing to command. He reached for the only language that fit. "I...
The Liautaud Graduate School of Business at the University of Illinois in Chicago looks, from the outside, like a family's finest hour. Jim Liautaud, a self-made technology entrepreneur, endowed it...
Toward the end of his life, one of the richest men in America called his family together to read them a letter. Jay Pritzker, grandson of the Russian immigrant law clerk who founded a dynasty that...
Every family fortune, however large, is in a race against multiplication. The clearest statement of that race we have ever read is a single paragraph of arithmetic from Hap Perry, founder and...
A young woman is exploring the attic of her childhood home when she finds a box. Inside are Christmas and birthday presents, years of them, addressed to her and her twin sister, every one unopened....
A man retired at 41 with more money than most people earn in several lifetimes, and the first thing his freedom took from him was the weekend. "The weekend would come and I would wonder how I could...
In American families with a summer house, there is one argument that returns every year like a season: who gets the Fourth of July weekend. The house is small, the family is growing, the holiday is...
Two brothers in their twenties, both in the family manufacturing firm, could not stop fighting. Dan, the engineer, ran production and was close to their father. Jerry, the marketer, ran sales, was...
The story begins the way thousands of family businesses begin. A couple starts a company in the family home. She is the first employee, the cheerleader, the one with faith in the venture; he keeps...
Two myths circulate wherever families do business together, and they are opposites, which is how you know at least one of them must be wrong. The first myth says love is enough: we are a close...
At thirty-three, the young man was running his family's insurance brokerage day to day. His father, the second-generation owner, remained chairman. Wanting to grow into the job properly, the son...
Somewhere in the pages of a European governance textbook, a Japanese family business owner was asked to explain the difference between a family business and any other kind. Companies measure...
A founder built a company and owned every share of it. He ran it well, and he ran it alone. Then one day his airplane went down, and he was gone. His two sons were not in the business. Each inherited...
In Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, two brothers run a family business founded in 1867. The Tengelmann Group is enormous: 4,346 stores, 83,826 employees, sales of 11 billion euros in the year the...
Two consultants who spent their careers inside troubled family companies noticed something eerie. When they mapped their client families on paper, generation above generation, the big events kept...
Two consultants who spent their careers inside family businesses once admitted, in print, to a fantasy about their clients. They had "often thought," they wrote, "about trying to find an ethical way...
A few years before she wrote her book, a financial adviser flew to Bermuda for a close friend's wedding and stretched the trip into a full eight-day vacation with her husband. It was, by her own...
Buried in the middle of a 2020 personal finance primer is a small, quiet experiment with a brutal ending. Three savers agree to the same discipline. Milton is twenty-two, Adam is thirty-two, Joseph...