Two of the greatest fortunes in American history ended up in very different places. When 120 Vanderbilt descendants gathered for a reunion in 1973, not one of them was a millionaire. Six generations on, the Rockefeller legacy remains remarkably intact, and the foundation established in 1913 still operates with an endowment of around $6 billion.
The difference was structure. In 1882 Rockefeller established what is regarded as the first full-service family office in the United States, on the insight that the skills required to create wealth are not the skills required to preserve it. More than 140 years later, those principles still describe what preserving wealth across generations actually takes: professional expertise, sound governance, diversification and succession planning, and, harder than any of them, preparing each generation to be a responsible steward of what it inherits.