Whats the oldest family than has been continuously wealthy in unbroken chain for longest period? Wikipedia mentions Rothschild family from 1700’s, which seems pretty recent really.
Lets go with the definition of wealthy as “no member of the direct family has to work for a living (but they may chose to)”.
I’m going to suggest the “House of Wettin” which became the Saxe Coburg And Gotha family, which then became the Windsors… eg the British Royal Family. I have no idea if they have been continuously wealthy but that would put it back to around 1000AD if they were.
perhaps some of the Arab royalty have a longer claim than that? Any other contenders?
How exactly do you define ‘the direct family’ in cases like this? If you take a single patriarch or matriarch, I think it’s very unlikely that all of their descendents in 300 years would be ‘don’t have to work, can live off family money’ wealthy, especially since some of them would reasonably have to be bringing new money into the family coffers.
Arab royalty? Based on what I saw in the film Lawrence of Arabia, they’ve only been wealthy since the discovery of oil there. Prior to that, they seemed to have been nomadic tribesmen.
IIRC, the House of Wettin wasn’t all that rich or powerful if you keep going back a ways. My guess would be the Fuggers or the Medici, but I don’t think there are any left.
As for Arab “royalty”…I don’t think so. As noted, their wealth came from oil and their royal status came from being slightly friendlier to the Brits.
The oldest hereditary monarchy is that of Japan, which traditionally originated in 660 BC. The first monarch with verifiable dates was around AD 500. However, I don’t think that ancient monarchs can be considered as “not having to work,” since I think directly managing a medieval realm was a pretty hard job.
This is the problem. Each generation the family wealth is going to get more and more diluted and those who inherit wealth don’t generally do a good job of stewarding it. There’s even an expression, “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” because a family fortune rarely survives three (or even two) generations.
“Rarely” admits exceptions: there’s families that have been doing quite well, like the aforementioned Rotschilds or the House of Alba. That doesn’t mean every person who has a drop of Rotschild or Alba blood spends the day getting manicures; I’m reasonably sure not even the Duchess does (yeah, she has managers, but those do need to be managed):
I often ponder such things, wondering if there really is a way that families can build core trusts that can be passed along but with sufficent legal isolation that nobody is allowed to pull out like more than half of the money than the trust can supply while still leaving the rest for compound interest. Can such a trust be built so a given benificiary of the trust cannot “sell off” their portion to places like jg wentworth.
Kennedy family has already blown most of their fortune. I read an news article a few years ago that said they were restricting who could inherit. Some of the more distant relations are out of luck.
Rockefeller family should be ok. It hasn’t been long since David Rockefeller had Chase Bank.
Johnson family of Johnson & Johnson, were in the news when one of the female heirs (Casey) had a fling with Paris Hilton. She died young. That left one less bimbo to waste the family fortune.
One would have to be creative with trusts in order to avoid the estate tax taking half of that fortune at every generation. IANA estate lawyer, but I think one has to give up a certain amount of control of one’s money to the trust at the outset, and the trust itself can contain limitations on how the money is paid out. Such trusts can only last a few generations, though; they cannot be perpetual.
I’m going to guess that the royal families of some Indian princely states are at least as old as most European royal families, although that category does fall afoul of the “not having to work” criterion, as Colibri noted. (Could we technically get around it by saying that any given member of a royal family probably could abdicate if they wanted to, and thereby avoid working? Somebody’s gotta be king or queen, but if the immediate heir decided they couldn’t be arsed to take on the job, I’m sure there’s somebody in line for the throne who would be only too delighted.)
Plenty of the Rajasthan maharaja dynasties go back to at least the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and plenty of them, like (by courtesy) HH Maharaja Sawai Bhawani Singh of Jaipur, are still getting along just fine in terms of family prosperity and prestige.
By the way, most of the Japanese emperors have had very little to do with the running of their empires. That is what you have Shoguns, and feudal lords for. Very wealthy prisoners, in many cases. But, they are rich.
The Ford family, for example, runs the Ford Foundation - a charity. The charity, IIRC, holds a huge fund to distribute, and employs some Ford family members as board members to oversee it, thus ensuring they have a cushy job for life.
Not sure how they ensure that it’s always Ford family members included, but obviously they have a way.
I suspect that worries about inheritance taxes are a relatively recent invention, just like income taxes.
