who really controls the world you might be thinking of individual plutocrats or politicians and sure they may be on top of the world now but they come and go and most will be forgotten eventually if you want to control the past present and future you know what you really need a dynasty that’s why today we’re shining a light on the families who control the world or at least a humongous portion of its wealth we’re going to tell you who these families are how they made their fortunes and what they’re doing with them this is a video you don’t want to miss now if you Google world’s richest families you’ll find countless clickbait lists PR puff pieces and a sprinkling of serious looking NGO reports but if you look at their sources it seems that all roads lead back to lists compiled by Forbes and Bloomberg even academic research on say wealth inequality the proliferation of billionaires and so on doesn’t have any better data to work with than Forbes and Bloomberg’s so if just two media companies have a duopoly on what we can know about rich families we’d better find out how they’re making these lists who qualifies and perhaps most importantly who is left off unfortunately for us there seems to be no standardized methodology different lists estimate wealth differently causing a significant variance in the dollar figures reported for the same family across different Publications and causing other families to be emitted entirely some lists include royalty and heads of state and some don’t one list by Bloomberg includes the house of Saud but limits it to just three generations while at the same time acknowledging that the wealth controlled by the estimate ated 15,000 living members of the family is likely much higher than the figure quoted some lists of individual rich people name check Bernard Arno and family suggesting that the Aros are an Inseparable unit and some lists of Rich families exclude Bernard Anno entirely because they don’t think his family counts at all for whatever reason in other words it’s kind of a mess every list seems to have different ideas about which family should or shouldn’t be included and if so how many of them how to count their riches and so on but a lack of standardization isn’t the only tricky variable we have to contend with that’s because Rich lists often rely on the cooperation of their subjects Forbes for example is known to send surveys to people it expects should be listed now if a family’s wealth comes from shares in a publicly traded company such as Walmart then it’s relatively straightforward to multiply the share price by the family’s Holdings and arrive at an estimate but when it comes to Investments made in private it’s a different story if a family doesn’t want to announce to the whole world in Forbes Magazine how much money they have then our understanding of their wealth is an educated guess at best and by the way if about the limits of forbes’ billionaire tracking abilities by listening to one krie Dolan she is the editor at Forbes who’s been responsible for collecting the data used in its Rich lists since 1994 in an interview with the New York Times Kerry said that quote the easiest sort of billionaire to handle is one whose wealth derives from his ownership stake in a publicly traded company probably one he founded though possibly one he inherited anyone who owns more than 5% of a company shares must disclose that fact along with the exact number of shares they hold by contrast meanwhile the kind of billionaire whom Kerry would quote never find is someone who quietly sold a stake in a business for say $250 million in the ’90s then invested it well today a guy like that could use his wealth to do whatever he wanted by truckloads of Nazi memorabilia try to persuade your mayor to privatize the City sewers or maybe both and you’d be none the wiser and in fact he wouldn’t even have had to be all that smart with his money if he parked $250 million in an S&P tracking Index Fund in 1992 and left it alone he’d be worth more than $4 billion today he would have slipped through the billion doll barrier like an Olympic diver but isn’t Kerry just describing generational wealth here most families that have been Rich for more than one or two generations will have been in investing their inherited wealth for decades and by the sounds of it wealth from any investment that isn’t in a publicly traded Market could be completely invisible to a journalist trying to put together a rich list if that’s the case then we should probably take dollar estimates of Rich families net worths with a big old grain of salt plus it sounds like there is a whole class of billionaires who we may never know about and that begs the question what about the ultra rich is it possible to have a net worth of several hundred billion dollars without anyone knowing about it or is that kind of wealth just too big to keep secret questions like these recall Donald rumsfeld’s poetic Axiom about the limits of human knowledge quote as we know there are known known there are things we know we know we also know there are known unknowns that is to say we know there are some things we do not know but there are also unknown unknowns the ones we don’t know we don’t know and if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones anyway you get the point Rich lists are hard we may never know exactly who all of the richest families or individuals in the world are or the true extent of their wealth but we do know enough of them to learn a thing or two about what makes Ultra wealth wealthy families tick so without further Ado here are three of the richest doxed civilian families on the planet who they are where their money comes from and what they’re doing with it first up the Aros of Louis vuon Moi Hennessy or lvmh fame Bernard Arno is said to be the richest person in the world but he appears on some lists of Rich individuals as Bernard Arno and family so you know he’s a family man just last year he appointed his daughter and fellow lvmh board member deline to run Christian Dior the second biggest brand Under the lvmh Umbrella her brother Antoine runs the holding company that controls the family fortune with a controlling stake in lvmh Anno has three other children who are also in line for his monogrammed Throne Alexandra Anno is an executive at Tiffany Frederick Arno is the CEO of tago and Jean Arno is the head of marketing and product development for watches at Louis Vuitton interestingly Bernard Arno is neither a fashion designer nor a founder and didn’t create any of the brands that now make up lvmh like his children Bernard inherited a role at his father’s business in Bernard’s case this was a public construction company called f savinel where he began his career in the early 1970s Anno persuaded his dad to Pivot towards real estate before switching ing Lanes again to luxury goods with the acquisition of financier aash where he became CEO now this turned out to be a fantastic move as it put Bernard in a position to win a bidding war for the struggling conglomerate busac s FR which was home to Christian Dior he bought the group for one Frank in 1984 laid off 9,000 of its workers and sold off almost everything except for Dior for these aggressive tactics and Al probably for the fact that his surname sounds like Arnold Bernard was nicknamed The Terminator Terminator of employment contracts perhaps anyway these tactics worked out brilliantly for him and within three years he was in a position to cook up the 1987 merger between Louis Vuitton and muray Hennessy and so the lvmh Behemoth was born in the intervening years lvmh has become a luxurious black hole sucking up aspir ational brands in fashion jewelry watches and wine in 2023 it reached a valuation of 500 billion dollars making it the largest company by market cap in the Euro Zone and the arnos one of the wealthiest families on the planet now there is a certain level of implied villain inherent to the role of world’s richest person you know that sort of Jeff Bezos energy or alternatively if you’re Elon Musk you can turn EV stocks into mem coins and command an army of fans who think you’re Tony Stark either way once you hit the CTI billionaire Mark you attract a lot of attention right well despite the fashionable Terminator Arc the Arno name seems to come with neither notoriety nor any swooning fans so how exactly have the arnos evaded scrutiny for so long you can troll through pages and pages of Google search results on Bernard and Co but there’s not much drama to be found Bernard’s Wikipedia page reads like a squeaky clean PR piece that emphasizes his philanthropic efforts through lvmh now this is an interesting angle to take considering that these efforts amounted to 4% of lvmh’s net profits of $4.1 billion in 2022 the sauciest tidbits that made it past the Wikipedia editors were arno’s application for Belgian citizenship which he horridly rescinded after being accused of attempting taxes ation then there was that time when he hurridly sold his private jet after someone on Twitter started publicly tracking its flights other than that though his bio doesn’t scream richest person alive clearly this is a dude who is trying not to Fumble the family bag he doesn’t want attention maybe because of France’s history of beheading people who bathe in money while Ordinary People slave away for a pittance anyway the Aros remind us of something about the ultra Rich that the musks Zuck and Bezos of the world make it easy to forget generational wealth is distinguished from Individual Tycoon by a chronic aversion to fame when there’s a massive funnel running from the world’s biggest luxury Brands into your bank account everyone can see when your stockh Holdings balloon to $200 billion but if it wasn’t for the public facing nature of the lvmh brands we suspect few people would even know the arno’s name okay next up The Waltons of Walmart Fame Walmart was founded in 1962 by Sam Walton and under his leadership the company became the largest company in the world by Revenue Sam Walton died in 1992 and is survived by three children Alice Rob and Jim whose stake in Walmart gives them a collective net worth of around $235 billion their late sibling John won died in a plane crash in 2005 and is survived by his widow Christie and Son Lucas whose share of the family fortune amounts to just $30 billion then there are the Poes of the family Nancy and Anne who are the daughters of the late but Walton Sam’s brother and urw business partner life is hard on the periphery of the Walton Dynasty and Nancy and Anne barely have $20 billion between them now despite making more money than he could possibly spend in several lifetimes Sam Walton was a fierce opponent of philanthropy he made this clear in a postumus released autobiography where he expressed his grave concern that charitable giving would drain value from shareholders in his own words quote We Believe very strongly that Walmart should not be in the charity business well Sam’s children seem to know how the billionaire game is played a little better than he did because they have busied themselves with repackaging the Walton name in a layer of philanthropy since Sam’s death the Walton have funneled billions of dollars into conservative think tanks and infrastructure for school privatization among other causes via their Walton Family Foundation aside from their Collective efforts as a foundation and controlling share of the world’s largest private employer Sam Walton’s three living children each have the resources to prop up the causes closest to their hearts so let’s take a quick look at what they’re doing with their money Alice Walton net worth $76 billion she is a Serial super pack funer whose presidential campaign contributions include to those of George Bush Mitt Romney and uh Hillary Clinton most of her philanthropic Ventures seem to be gestures towards the Arts and education in her home state of Arkansas but more recently she’s turned her attention to healthcare at the moment Alice is is busy building the Alice L Walton school of medicine a nonprofit school for allopathic medicine which is a usually derogatory term for the precursor to Modern evidence-based medicine well it’s her money I suppose next up there’s Rob Walton net worth $77 billion co-owner of the Denver Broncos football team alongside former Secretary of State condalisa rice among others political contributions partially undisclosed but thought to include a web of political and media organizations in Colorado and Arkansas then there’s Jim Walton net worth $82 billion backer of national and state level Republican infrastructure and candidates including Ronda santis he has been particularly active in Florida where he appears to be behind the Florida Coalition for modern laws a pressure group lobbying to have the state’s trust laws Rewritten the Coalition was created by the same New York who set up The Walton’s new Family Trust in Florida just a year earlier its legislative wins include the passing of a new state law that permanently seals all future Court proceedings involving a private Family Trust Company another win meanwhile was the crippling of the state’s rule against perpetuities which was changed so that a single trust can now continue for 1,000 years originally trusts were limited to just 90 years and this was later quadrupled to 360 years but apparently 360 years is too short a Time Horizon for the Walton Dynasty so 1,000 It is Well you don’t make big money by thinking small I suppose our third and final family is a shy Swedish Dynasty who have the distinction of being the oldest money on our list meet the venberg collective net worth $420 billion by some estimates the T of their riches began in 1858 when Andre Oscar valenberg founded Stockholm’s in skila bank which would later become sebb or scandinava and Skil deunan currently Sweden’s largest bank by market cap and total assets in the intervening years valenberg would become powerful industrialists politicians diplomats and bureaucrats and the family Now controls the four largest companies on the Swedish stock exchange their own Investment Company investor tech company ABB farmer and biotech Giant astrazenica and Atlas Copco the industrial tools manufacturer but you know when the wealth and power of a European family stretches uninterrupted through the entire 20th century there’s one question begging to be asked what exactly were they doing between the years 1939 and 1945 well the first answer you’re likely to hear will be about rul valenberg who is the most famous valenberg to date and for good reason rul was a diplomat working in Budapest during World War II who is celebrated for his efforts to rescue Jews from the Holocaust but you know family business can be messy at the same time Raul was housing and issuing protective passports to thousands of Jews his family’s Bank allegedly took ownership of foreign subsidiaries of IDE G fabon and other Nazi industrial concerns to prevent them from being seized by the Allies now if you not familiar IG fabon was a notorious Nazi chemical cartel that experimented upon and worked tens of thousands of slaves in concentration camps to the brink of death and produced zycon B the poison gas that killed them when they could work no more the stockham’s in skila bank has also been accused of buying up shares and bonds that it knew full well had been stolen from Jewish investors then there was the allegation that the bank funded Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons research anyway nobody appeared to notice and stockholmes in skila Bank came out of the war squeaky clean clearing the way for subsequent generations of wenberg to become one of the world’s richest families the combined value of the companies in the venberg sphere as their business Empire is known amounts to more than 400 50 billion interestingly the net worth of the current fifth generation leaders of the volberg sphere yakob Marcus and Peter Jr is said to be just eight figures each this is a result of the renberg’s Securus business model that they call uh the circuit the venberg control a web of 16 nonprofit foundations which collectively own controlling shares in more than 30 massive companies via investor the fames ly named investment company that is the real Jewel in their Crown the profits from these Investments are reinvested into the foundations and so it is that the nominal net wealth of individual members of the wenberg family is kept nominally minuscule compared to the amount of value they actually control as far as we’re concerned this strategy is not enough to exclude the $450 billion valenberg sphere from our list of richest families the valenberg may keep a low profile as individuals but their power and influence is just too sprawling to hide we can point to for example the valenberg close relationships with Sweden’s royal family with Sweden’s largest political party the social Democrats and their proximity to discussions regarding Sweden’s joining of NATO volberg controlled companies most notably Swedish weapons manufacturer Saab stand to gain a lot from Sweden joining NATO so we imagine the champagne was flowing when full membership was granted earlier this year it is hard to imagine the valenberg being on the breadline anytime between now and the Very crack of Doom so three families who control almost a trillion dollars between them they amass their riches in different ways and seem to live quite differently too but what unites them is a structured approach to not fumbling the generational bag they entrench their next of kin in the family business Empire avoid the spotlight like Kryptonite and spray a albeit thin layer of philanthropy over their family name to mask the smell of villainy that comes from hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars statistically none of us are ever likely to attain anything even close to these levels of wealth but we can still learn a lesson here folks if you do become fortunate enough to come into a large amount of money someday you should probably keep a low profile and resist the proximity to fame that so often comes with riches try to keep your name out of the media and if Forbes sends you a survey in the post burn it if you do have a public profile though hire a good PR agency to make sure the first 10 pages of Google search results for your name are as boring as possible set up a nonprofit organization and have it donate a minuscule sliver of your wealth to one social cause or another and then make sure everyone knows about the great work your foundation is doing if you can rub shoulders with politicians and give generously to their campaigns get them hooked on your donation money and then make it known what kind of policies you would like to see enacted and finally consider putting your wealth in assets that hold their value over time and that your family will be able to access if anything ever happens to you these could include BTC they could include gold or they could even include a good old fashioned trust fund because remember however Rich you are you can’t take it with you and if you’re serious about starting a family Dynasty then you better make sure there’s plenty left over for your children when you finally depart to the great herea and that’s all for today folks so if you learn something new in this video make sure the like button is in Smither if you think we missed an important family let us know about them in the comments make sure you’re subscrib to the channel and have your bell notifications on so you don’t miss the next upload and as always thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time this is guy over and out [Music]
