The wealth whisperers who save super-rich families from themselves
A new caste of consultants is helping to avoid “Succession”-style crises
By Sophie Elmhirst
Marlene Engelhorn first understood that her family was wealthy when she noticed quite how much larger their house was than those of her childhood friends.
“We called it a big house,” she told me.
“But it’s a mansion for crying out loud.
Call it what it is.”
Growing up, her family’s financial adviser was such a constant presence that she thought he was her uncle.
She didn’t know exactly how rich her family was, however, until she was 27, when she was told she would inherit a €25m ($26.3m) fortune from her grandmother.
The money was no longer just part of the ambience, it was hers.
Engelhorn, now 32, is one of many beneficiaries of what has become known as the Great Wealth Transfer.
Over the next 20 years, younger generations are set to inherit $72 trillion from their baby-boomer parents and grandparents, according to Cerulli, a financial-services consultancy.
For the super-rich, it is a process fraught with risk, said Dominic Samuelson, chief executive of Campden Wealth, a British company that advises moneyed families.
Such families can go from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” in three generations, as the saying goes.
Siblings feud, an heir succumbs to addiction, an errant child squanders the fortune – and the family “falls down”, as Samuelson put it.
Campden Wealth is one of a number of firms that offer to arrest this fall.
Since 1999 it has organised forums where the world’s wealthiest families can gather to discuss the challenges of being extremely wealthy in the sympathetic company of other extremely wealthy people.
(To join Campden Wealth’s 1,400 members, a family must be worth at least £100m – $125m.)
Journalists are not allowed into these conclaves.
Jan Gerber, a longtime member and founder of a rehabilitation centre for the wealthy, said the sessions were very different from what an “outsider” might imagine.
“Even if it’s a business topic, very often personal emotions, experiences, of a positive and a painful kind are shared,” he explained over the phone from his holiday in Costa Rica.
“It’s far from elitist and ‘we rule the world’.
We are families, we are human beings, we are most of us here in the room born into this, we didn’t choose this.
We take this very seriously and we have a lot of responsibility.”
A service industry has sprung up to help rich families survive the challenges thrown at them – and preserve their wealth.
In summer 2023 Samuelson and his brother Henry, his partner at Campden Wealth, launched an online education programme called the Family Wealth Essentials Series.
The course, which costs nearly $10,000, does not deal with the financial side of wealth management.
Instead, it explores more philosophical subjects, such as family governance – and strife.
Twenty-six students from around the world signed up for the first course, nine of them from the same three families.
Samuelson gave me access to some of the course’s video tutorials.
In the first module, Bryn Monahan, who describes herself as a family-enterprise consultant, takes her students back to first principles: “We’re going to be thinking about this big meaty word ‘wealth’.
What does it mean to you?” she asks brightly.
To answer this question, Monahan draws on her own experience as a member of the fourth generation of a Pittsburgh steel family.
Like Engelhorn, Monahan wasn’t aware at first of the extent of her family’s wealth – she went to a private school and plenty of the other kids had large houses and went on fancy holidays.
The main difference she noticed was the amount of time she spent with her extended family.
This, she felt, was driven less by sentiment than the need to entwine the branches of the family together.
“I know my third cousins,” she said.
But great wealth forces children to consider their legacy – and their mortality – almost before adulthood has begun.
At the age of 18, Monahan was told she had to make a will.
The family steel business had been sold in the 1970s and, since then, their wealth had been managed by a family office, on the board of which multiple branches of the family were represented.
Family offices – entities that manage family wealth – are proliferating.
(According to “The Family Office Boom”, a recent report by DBS Private Bank, written with the Economist Intelligence Unit, there are now more than 10,000 family offices worldwide, with 40% of those created in the past ten years.)
Each one is its own beast.
The wealthiest, which can oversee billions, are larger than many hedge funds, though they face less scrutiny or regulation, since they seldom deal with ordinary punters or pose a risk to financial systems.
Typically, a family office is led by a principal (often it is “G1 patriarch” – the first-generation father) and a board of both family members and external advisers.
The board establishes a vision and a set of values, and agrees on an investment strategy.
In the case of Monahan’s family, each branch is represented on the board; the chief executive and two other board members come from outside the clan.
“We operate unanimously.
If we don’t have everyone saying yes, we don’t move forward with decision-making,” said Monahan.
With so many cousins and so much money involved, the rules have to be clear.
What happens to one member of a family can have repercussions for everyone.
For example, when Monahan’s great-uncle died before having children, the wealth of the remaining branches increased.
Monahan was formally introduced into her family office in 1998 through an education programme put together by the family accountant turned chief executive, who brought in a local professor to teach her and her cousins about inheritance planning and financial management.
“We were like, this is boring,” Monahan told me.
“We basically said, you’ve got to come up with something different if you want us to be interested in this.”
The cousins decided they wanted to learn about finance through practice, rather than the classroom.
Each was given $5,000 from their individual trusts which they pooled and invested.
They called their new fund Five Fourths – five cousins of the fourth generation.
Creating a joint-investment vehicle might not be your typical family-bonding exercise, but Monahan spoke almost lovingly of its effects.
The benefit, she said, was “getting to know each other, learning about leadership styles, collaboration techniques”.
Monahan and her cousins started new initiatives, including family-history projects and “a family day of caring” which involved the whole tribe volunteering.
(Naturally, they give money through their foundation as well.)
After Monahan joined the board of her family office in 2010, she found herself advising other rich families about how to engage the next generation.
Often they were more concerned that their kids might squander the family wealth.
They hadn’t asked them what they might want to do with it, or, more fundamentally, what it might be for.
To Monahan’s mind, the families that haven’t considered these questions are most likely to fall apart.
Her admonitory example is that of the Hiltons, the hotel magnates, who have been embroiled in legal battles for nearly 50 years, after two successive Hilton patriarchs gave the vast majority of their wealth to the family foundation, prompting some of their children to sue the foundation to claim their inheritance.
The Murdochs, similarly, were recently engaged in a court battle: Rupert took on three of his children, after deciding to amend his trust and pass control of his media empire on to his elder son, Lachlan.
His case was thrown out in December 2024.
What happens when the next generation decides they don’t want to play along with the family’s business strategy?
Monahan’s family, at least in her version, demonstrates the opposite course: a kind of idealised model of a high-functioning wealthy family.
And yet, hearing her talk about her relatives had a strange effect.
She described all the recognisable stuff of family life – the inevitability of disagreements, the importance of connection, the value of shared endeavours – but she also revealed that one of the key objectives set by her family office is to have the same amount of wealth per person in 100 years as they do now.
All the communication and togetherness and family days of caring exist partly to preserve and multiply their wealth.
It is, at root, a business strategy.
Even wealthy families are still families.
Personalities differ; emotions boil.
What happens when the next generation decides they don’t want to play along with the family’s business strategy?
Evamaria Zouppa, a Campden member and eager student on the Family Wealth Essentials course, is the chief executive of her family office, and currently trying to determine its future.
Zouppa, who talks about her family wealth with bracing frankness, was born rich owing to her father’s Greek shipping business.
She married a successful trader and started to invest both their fortunes.
After their divorce in 2000, she received a lump sum.
She gave three-quarters to Smith and Williamson, a London wealth-management firm, for “preservation”, and kept the remaining quarter to invest herself.
“And I had record returns!
I did so, so well.”
Two years ago Zouppa’s father asked her if she’d manage his wealth too.
Zouppa agreed and formed a family office.
The handover involved a shift from her father’s conservative approach to Zouppa’s riskier one.
His office had always followed a rule that once a stock made a 10% return, they sold it.
“I say, ‘No no no, we don’t sell at 10%!’” said Zouppa.
“This is just the starting point.
We need to wait until we’ve made 40, 50, 60, 80%.”
Zouppa can be uncompromising.
Her sister – a holistic healer in Austria living in “a completely different world” – sometimes has to come in and smooth things over with the staff at the family office.
“I have taken conflict resolution [on the Campden course],” Zouppa admitted.
She has also learned to hold regular family councils.
At one recently, she went round the table and asked everyone to say what their wealth was for.
“My mother said that wealth is a means to education.
My father said wealth is a means to problem-solving.
My sister said wealth is a means to philanthropy.
What did my nephew say?
I can’t remember what my nephew said.”
She laughed.
As Zouppa never had children of her own, her 13-year-old nephew is now the sole heir.
“In a meeting we had three months ago, he said he wanted to build his own fortune, and create his own story, like Grandpa,” Zouppa told me.
“He doesn’t want any help, he doesn’t want anything from us.”
Zouppa’s nephew may be acting out of self-preservation: hoping to avoid the fate of all those who, as Zouppa put it, become “victims” of their wealth: those who don’t work, who can’t find a purpose, who “lose their humanity”.
Some families try to ward off this scenario by requiring their children to reach a senior level in an unrelated company before they benefit or become involved in the family wealth.
Even so it can be hard to stop wealth – or the promise of it – from enabling or hastening self-destruction.
Paul Flynn, the chief executive of Harbor, a London-based rehabilitation centre for the super-rich suffering from mental-health crises, told me how his staff often heard from younger patients about the “burden of privilege”.
(A burden, he conceded, that rarely elicited much sympathy.)
We met in Harbor’s headquarters, a suite of freshly decorated, high-ceilinged rooms in an elegant townhouse in Victoria, where patients and their families gather to talk.
(The patient receives individual treatment in one of the 15 residences used by Harbour in ritzy London neighbourhoods: Notting Hill, Chelsea, Knightsbridge and Kensington.)
Harbor’s package costs £50,000-90,000 a week for at least six weeks of treatment, which ranges from intensive psychiatry to hypnotherapy.
Half the programme’s patients come from the Gulf.
Flynn has noticed patterns among his patients, and how destruction can spread through a family.
The older generation, typically the patriarch, may depend on alcohol or benzos, the women may have eating disorders and the younger generation may be hooked on prescription drugs.
Addiction is enabled not only by money, but by the absence of true friends, said Flynn.
Some super-rich tend to be isolated, their closest relationships with drivers or personal chefs whose salaries they pay.
Often, if one family member has come in for urgent treatment, the rest will follow.
Recently, they had four members of the same family from a Gulf state simultaneously receiving treatment.
Another recent patient was a young person from East Asia, whose parents ended up staying for a month to receive what Flynn described as “psychological education”.
This helped them understand that the sense of shame they felt about their child’s addiction was doing more harm than good.
The problems pass down generations.
Often, Flynn encounters the issue of “inherited neglect”: “A lot of the people we see might have gone to boarding school aged 8 and have a distant transactional relationship with their parents,” he said.
“But their parents have also had that upbringing.”
Some families fear that a struggle with addiction or a public divorce battle could degrade their wealth by causing reputational damage.
This fear extended even to younger generations’ relationships.
(One young person from a super-rich family told me she knew of other families who would “disown someone who might come out as gay or marry someone from a different class”.)
“These families have to endure,” said Flynn.
Having a family office helps, he insists.
While it might transform a family from one which, as Flynn put it, sits around the table on a Sunday “and talks about the weather and the football” into one which has quarterly board meetings, a values statement and a charter, it can at least allow the family “to be a family for 80% of the time” – which is better than no time at all.
Sitting in Harbor’s family space, with its light grey walls, expensive ceramics and a golden vase full of artfully shaped sticks, I wondered whether its therapists ever advised their patient simply to walk away – from both the family and the wealth.
“It’s not our job to tell people to do that,” said Flynn.
They’ve had patients distance themselves from their families – typically children cutting off contact with a parent – but it was essential that they came to that decision by themselves.
As for giving up the wealth: “If someone has access to a £50m trust fund, they’re not going to turn it off,” he insisted.
“They’re not.”
And yet rebels exist.
Not just a teenage dabbler, or a renegade drop-out, but a character strong enough to disrupt the family system; someone willing to turn off the tap.
For the Engelhorns, inheritors of the fortune created by the 19th-century German industrialist, Friedrich Engelhorn, that person is Marlene.
Engelhorn’s unease about her family’s riches started at school: “There was a class divide between students and teachers,” she told me over a Zoom call from Austria.
The gulf between the incomes of the teachers and the students’ parents sometimes resulted in conflict, she explained.
After she found out about her inheritance, she started reading about inequality and taxation, and was stunned by how little the rich were taxed on inherited wealth (the Engelhorns make an appearance in the Paradise Papers, a leaked cache of documents that exposed how rich families stashed their money in offshore tax havens).
She decided she wanted to redistribute her money.
There was one problem: she didn’t know how.
“I made a lot of people uncomfortable,” she told me, “including myself…I’d talk to friends of mine and I’d be like, I want to talk about the wealth of my family and I want to talk numbers: are you up for it?”
Engelhorn co-founded a German initiative called Tax Me Now.
Since 2022 she has protested each year at Davos and co-signed letters calling for higher taxes for the super-rich alongside fellow millionaires such as Abigail Disney, an heiress to the Mickey Mouse fortune.
When her campaigning had minimal results, she decided that if the state was not willing to tax her properly, she would redistribute her wealth herself, as democratically as possible.
She wanted her money to be distributed democratically, so in January 2024, she announced the establishment of the Guter Rat, the Good Council.
This body would be made up of 50 randomly selected Austrians, of different ages, incomes and races, who, guided by a board of academic advisers, would decide how to give away her inheritance.
The stipulations were clear: the money could only go to non-profit ventures and could not support political parties or any activities that were “unconstitutional, anti-life or inhumane”.
In June 2024 Guter Rat announced that 77 organisations, working on poverty, health, education, the environment and affordable housing, would receive grants ranging from €40,000 to €1.6m over the next five years.
(Out of €25m, €24,946,000 was given away, and €54,000 went back to Engelhorn.)
Now, Engelhorn is hoping to convince other wealthy young people to give away their money.
Recently, a woman approached her after a talk she’d given and admitted, a little furtively, “I’m wealthy too.”
They had coffee, talked, and now the young woman has come up with her own redistribution plan.
As well as helping others, Engelhorn wanted to “ascend” into the 99%.
“We can’t pretend that power doesn’t do something to you,” she said.
She knew that she would never be rid of her privilege – “I’m part of a billionaire family, for crying out loud” – but she could at least try to relieve herself of its blinding effect.
So far, Engelhorn’s family have been supportive of her decision, “at least those I know and I’m in touch with.
There might be some who think screw her, but I’m like, ‘I don’t know you, I don’t care.’”
Her mother told her she was becoming her biggest fan.
Yet no one else in the family has, so far, publicly followed her example.
For many super-rich people, Engelhorn’s actions will seem like self-sabotage and injurious to the family itself.
But for Engelhorn, the transformation of a family into a money-preservation business is a perversion of everything a family should be.
“These families need conservative and patriarchal structures of family to uphold wealth,” she said.
“In order to justify the upkeep of wealth, they use the family theory of care and love.
I’m not saying they don’t feel care and love, but look at wealthy families and look at who gets disowned.
Because it does happen.
Unless you abide by rules, you’re not going to touch family wealth.”
Engelhorn’s shedding of her riches is more than an act of philanthropy and more than a political statement.
It is an attempt to salvage herself and her relationships from what she sees as the distorting effects of extreme wealth.
Engelhorn wants to tear down the whole edifice.
“These families grow into their wealth as well as the wealth grows into the family and you can’t separate it any more.”
She looked disturbed, suddenly, as if she were describing a dangerous intermingling of two potent chemicals.
“I have seen people break down crying – wealthy people – when they’re asked, if you were stripped of all your wealth, ‘Who are you?’
They couldn’t say, because the wealth had become their life.”
Sophie Elmhirst is a contributing writer for 1843 magazine and author of “Maurice and Maralyn”
ILLUSTRATIONS MICHAEL GLENWOOD
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