Billionaire heirs have a how-to-spend-it problem
Ten-figure fortunes come mainly from inheritance, not from hard work. But if heirs don’t know how to make money, are they good stewards of family riches?
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“LET me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” F Scott Fitzgerald could have added that they are also generationally different from each other.
For the first time in the history of UBS Group’s annual study of billionaires, new billionaires accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship: Some US$151 billion was inherited by 53 heirs in the year to Apr 6, versus the US$141 billion in fortunes of 84 new self-made billionaires.
As the Swiss bank pointed out, the pivot may have been expected, but this “great wealth handover” is gaining momentum. More than a thousand aging billionaire entrepreneurs are expected to bequeath US$5.2 trillion to heirs in the coming two to three decades.
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