Silver spoon oligarchs: How America’s 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality
Much of the media’s focus today is on new wealth billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk, who have become centi-billionaires in their lifetimes. Lurking behind these dynamic first-generation stories, however, are persistent examples of even greater multi-generational dynastic wealth.
In healthy, equitable democratic societies, great fortunes dissipate over a few generations as initial wealth holders have children and grandchildren, pay their fair share of taxes, and make charitable gifts. But our country’s wealth is accumulating in fewer hands, including among people who may be up to seven generations removed from the original source of their family’s wealth.
At a certain stage, some of these wealth holders — or their descendants — shift resources to consolidate their wealth, fend off competition, and create monopolies. As this report will show, they focus less on creating new wealth and more on preserving existing systems that extract ongoing rents from consumers and the real economy.
America’s dynastic families, both old and new, are deploying a range of wealth preservation strategies to further concentrate wealth and power — power that is deployed to influence democratic institutions, depress civic imagination, and rig the rules to further entrench inequality. This tax avoidance means less support for the infrastructure we all rely on to preserve our health, safety, and quality of life.
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