Self-made billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk made huge profits during the Covid-19 pandemic but a new report shows there’s no beating family money when it comes to getting – and staying – really, really rich.
Ten of the US’s richest families, including the Walmart family and the dynasties behind industries including candy and cosmetics, also saw their assets balloon over the pandemic, with a shared increase in their combined net worth of over $136bn in 14 months, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) published on Wednesday.
The report, Silver Spoon Oligarchs, details how these families have not only increased their wealth by billions in the last year, but have also worked to ensure the system supports this exponential growth over decades.
Chuck Collins, a co-author of the report and director at IPS, said: “If the system is functioning as it should, we should not see wealth accelerating over generations, it should be dispersing.”
In 1983 the Walton family, whose patriarch Sam Walton founded Walmart, were worth $2.15bn (or $5.6bn in 2020 dollars). By the end of 2020, Walton’s descendants had a combined net worth of over $247bn, an inflation-adjusted increase of 4,320%.
The family behind some of the US’s favorite candy bars, the Mars family, have also enjoyed a sweet return on their fortunes, increasing their family wealth by 28% or $21bn from March 2020 to May 2021.
The Mars dynasty began in 1911, when Franklin and Ethel Mars opened a candy factory that grew to produce bestsellers such as Milky Way and Snickers in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, it is run by their descendants.
In 2020, their family wealth was $94bn, according to the Forbes magazine Billion-Dollar Dynasties List, which was a key resource for the report. IPS compared information from the 2020 list to a similar list Forbes published in 1983 and adjusted that information to reflect what it would be in today’s dollars.
Between 1983 and 2020, Mars family wealth increased by 3,517% from $2.6bn to $94bn. They were one of 27 families to appear on the Forbes lists in 1983 and in 2020, and together those families combined assets have grown by 1,007% in 37 years.
Even among the super rich income inequality is an issue. The very, very wealthy did even better than their less rich cohorts. The five wealthiest dynastic families in the US have seen their wealth increase by a median 2,484% from 1983 to 2020.
The numbers for an average American family are a blip in comparison. From 1989 to 2019, the most recent year the data is available, a typical family’s median wealth increased by an inflation-adjusted 93%, according to the report.
Collins, director of the IPS Program on Inequality and the Common Good, said these families weren’t just making more money, they were also getting better at putting it out of reach of taxation.
The report outlines six…
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