They often say that money makes the world go around, but if that were true then surely by now we’d have spun off our axis by now and been flung, screaming towards the sun and a certain, not entirely unwelcome doom. Something we say because each and every year there are stories about the wealthiest and most-punchable people on the planet and the businesses they run or have a stake in becoming even richer.
But they also say that while money talks, wealth whispers, a nod to the fact that the truly, unthinkably filthy rich are people you’ve probably never heard of and that’s kinda what they want. It’s a lot easier to do shady evil rich person stuff when nobody knows who you are. So let’s correct that and list ten wealthiest business dynasties in the world.
To be clear, this is neither a list of the richest people (that’s been done to death), nor the most valuable companies (because it’s always Apple), but one of bonafide business dynasties, literal billion-dollar business empires controlled by a single family. Families like…
10. The Hoffmann And Oeri Family
Total worth: About $25 billion
How they made it all: Drugs (the legal kind)
Based in Switzerland, so you just know these guys aren’t paying tax, the Hoffmann-Oeri family are major players in the pharmaceutical industry, controlling a not insignificant portion of the company Roche, a manufacturer of various drugs that treat cancer. Yeah, they’re those kind of soulless billionaires.
Highly secretive with their fingers in many a Swiss pie, the various heirs of original Roche founder, Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche own and have stakes in a wide variety of business and philanthropic ventures. The most unusual is the Puppenhausmuseum, purportedly the largest collection of teddy bears anywhere on Earth, founded and funded by the wife of one of Roche’s many heirs.
As an idea of how many people are still living off the money made by this guy, back in the 1930s the family literally created their own bank for the express purpose of managing the portfolios and newly-acquired fortunes of anyone inheriting or otherwise acquiring shares in the company via marriage, birth, divorce, etc. To date, the dynasty has produced no less than a dozen billionaires.
9. The Lee Family
Total worth: About $29 billion
How they made it: They own controlling shares in Samsung
Pretty much everyone owns a cell phone these days. Hell, analytics say a good number of people reading this right now are doing so on the toilet. To those people, hello, and remember to elevate your legs slightly and wash your hands. Anyway, someone has to be making all those phones and of course, someone is getting very rich off of all of those sales, like the Lee family of South Korea.
Since the family owns a controlling stake in freaking Samsung we probably don’t need to tell you how they made their money. But it is worth noting how a lot of that money was invested. Art. Basic rich people stuff, we know. But specifically, the Lee family, in particular former patriarch Lee Byung-chul, had an interest in Korean art to the point his personal collection was said to rival that of actual museums. In fact, after he died they up and turned his collection into a museum in its own right.
Speaking of basic rich people stuff the family has also been embroiled in several controversies, the most notable being former Samsung chairman and current skeleton Kun-Hee Lee bribing the president of South Korea multiple times. In that he bribed different, consecutive South Korean presidents using company funds multiple times.
Keen to prove himself a chip off the old block, Lee’s son, Jae-yong Lee was also convicted of bribing another South Korean president. He was later pardoned in 2022 by, you guessed it, the South Korean President (a different one this time), for reasons totally unrelated to the family’s history of giving presidents millions of won.
8. The Ambani Family
Total worth: About $45 billion
How they made it: Telecommunication, among other things
Unlike a lot of the other families on this list who purposely maintain a low profile and largely avoid the public eye, the Ambani family is a notable exception to this with patriarch Mukesh Ambani owning what is considered to be the single most expensive private home in the world, Antilia.
This towering mansion/skyscraper (we really don’t know how else to describe it) is worth an estimated $2 billion, though it’s likely worth much more due to a number of features not known to the public, such as various safety systems that would allow anyone inside to weather a magnitude eight earthquake without the ice cream from the on-site, dedicated ice cream parlor moving at all. As an idea of how palatial this place is, the only private home on Earth said to be potentially worth more is Buckingham Palace.
Anyway, the family has of course been involved in standard rich people scandals like stock manipulation but the one we’re most intrigued by is a massive legal battle between the aforementioned Mukesh and his brother Anil over the family’s fortune. Their father and the founder of the company their wealth came from passed without a will for anyone curious about the source of their animosity towards one another.
Since then both men have constantly sniped at one another in the press to the point their own mother had to step in and mediate the whole thing. Which admittedly is very funny.
7. The Dumas Family
Total worth: Estimated range from $25 to $151 depending on how many members of the family you include
How they made it: They own a controlling stake in Hermès
It’s a popular joke that luxury, designer brands sell overpriced crap to idiots with more money than sense, but they still sell those things for a premium with, no doubt, a very healthy profit margin. Which is presumably how the Dumas family, who own a controlling stake in Hermès, have consistently placed on the richest family lists for, quite literally, over a century.
Descended from Thierry Hermès, for whom the company is named, the current-day Dumas family boasts at least five billionaires according to Forbes, and the family is collectively worth more than the “Rockefellers, the Mellons, and the Fords. Combined.”
Something we should clarify here is that the Dumas family are direct descendants of the original company founder, making Hermès one of the largest companies in the world still owned and operated by the family that founded it. A detail that probably has at least a few of you wondering why they no longer go by the Hermès name, which is fair, and is a result of the granddaughter of Thierry Hermès, Emile-Maurice Hermès, only having daughters. Complicating things further is the fact that some sources still report on the family as being the Hermès family despite nobody involved with the company using that name anymore.
6. The Bettencourt Family
Total worth: About $100 billion
How they made it: A controlling stake in L’Oreal
So, so far we’ve covered fairly basic evil rich person stuff like manipulating stocks and bribing multiple presidents in a row so let’s do it, let’s press the Nazi button.
Currently helmed by the reclusive billionaire matriarch, Francoise Bettencourt, the Bettencourt family’s fortunes are owed to Eugène Schueller, original founder of L’Oreal and Bettencourt’s grandfather.
Unfortunately inventing and selling hair dye wasn’t all Schueller got up to and he was reportedly all in on Hitler and the far right during WW2, personally bankrolling far-right groups and even letting them have their crappy little meetings in L’Oreal’s headquarters.
Now while the Bettencourt fortune didn’t come from any of this, it sure as hell makes for uncomfortable reading and is something Bettencourt and the L’Oreal brand have desperately tried to distance themselves from. Which is why we’re very sorry to have brought it up.
In regards to Bettencourt, she’s, as mentioned, very reclusive, rarely appearing in public or granting interviews. But she does occasionally emerge from her presumably very well-moisturized bubble to do things like drop almost a quarter of a billion Euros to help repair Notre Dame or a random book on Greek mythology.
5. The Slim Family
Total worth: About $95 Billion
How they made it: The various holdings of the conglomerate Grupo Carso as well as telecommunications
You know the trope of the iron-fisted billionaire who owns and hoards so many resources that even they don’t truly know the extent of their fabulous wealth. Well, that’s kinda the case for the patriarch of the formidable Slim family dynasty, Carlos Slim.
Considered a polarizing figure in his native Mexico due to the fact he owns, well, pretty much everything to the point one researcher noted that an ordinary Mexican probably can’t go 24 hours without doing something to add to his wealth, Slim is old school. Like, really old school. As in, he doesn’t own a computer and still writes things down using a pad and pencil.
Which is cool when you’re running, like, a lemonade stand, not a billion-dollar multinational conglomerate that employs thousands of people. This isn’t to say Slim isn’t on the ball. He’s reportedly incredibly sharp and astute in matters of business. But he himself has joked that he doesn’t really know how much he owns.
Notably frugal, at least by billionaire standards, Slim has strategically placed each of his children on the board of directors of one of his many holdings and spent many years quietly transferring portions of his wealth to them to ensure while the family name remains Slim, their wallets remain fat.
4. The Wertheimer Family
Total worth: About $95 billion
How they made it: They own Chanel, as in, outright
For many of the entries on this list, we’ve mentioned how the families own stakes and holdings in various businesses and that is how they’ve amassed and managed to hold onto such a vast amount of wealth. The Wertheimer brothers are an exception to this because they own the source of their fortune outright. In this case, Chanel.
Notoriously private, the brothers are said to have convinced their father, Jacques Wertheimer, to hand the business off to them after he inherited it from Pierre Wertheimer, the original founder of the brand (alongside Coco Chanel, of course). The stated reason why is that Jacque, for lack of a better term, simply didn’t give a damn about running a perfume company and instead put all his money into horses — raising them, not betting on them — and was reportedly non-plussed when his sons ousted him and gained sole ownership of the company in the 1970s.
Due to their intensely guarded private lives, we really can’t say much about what the brothers get up to, with even board members of Chanel finding it difficult to get even basic details about the company out of the pair. How basic, you ask? Well, for like three decades under the brothers’ control, the company didn’t even bother releasing a financial statement, doing so for the first time in the company’s entire history in 2017. They were doing quite well for anyone wondering.
As a result of this, we have no idea who will inherit the company. We know both brothers are married with kids, but nobody has ever seen them and the pair never attend Chanel events, the exception being fashion shows, for which they sit at the back and refuse to mingle.
3. The Mars Family
Total worth: About $125 billion
How they made it: Candy, as well as other things that aren’t candy
So a lot of families on this list are secretive, and their reasons vary. However, none are as weird as those of Mars family, whose commitment to being as far out of the public eye as possible stems from their ancestor being fearful someone would learn the secret of how to make Uncle Ben’s Rice.
Yep, the company that makes M&M’s, Skittles, and Milky Way also owns the patent on how to make Uncle Ben’s Rice and they’re fiercely protective of it. So much so that the son of the founder, Forrest Edward Mars Sr., is said to have picked a fight with the US government when they tried to acquire the patent to make rice for soldiers. Eventually, a compromise was reached in the form of a contract to supply the military with all the parboiled rice they could handle.
Anyway, the lessons on secrecy passed down by Mars Sr. are still upheld and adhered to, with the current members of the Mars family being nearly impossible to learn anything about. A notable exception is Jacqueline Mars, who is described as being the only member of the whole family “with a lifestyle close to reflecting her billionaire status.”
Which of course means she’s killed two people. In a car crash, for which she was fined $2,500.
2. The Arnault Family
Total worth: Some estimates range as high as $240 billion
How they made it: Holdings in numerous luxury brands
So when we say the Arnault family has holdings in “numerous luxury brands” we really, really mean that, with even the company they own that owns these holdings basically being the names of several high-end brands strung together: LVMH, which stands for Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton.
Through this conglomerate, the Arnault family has a stake in pretty much everything you’d associate with being a rich jerk. Fancy overpriced watches? TAG Heuer. Champagne? Take your pick, since they have holdings in Chandon, Dom Pérignon, and of course, Moët. How about yachts? Well, you’re in luck because they also own a share of the appropriately named Princess Yachts. Never before has one company offered more variety, with the exception of when Yamaha decided to sell both keyboards and motorcycles.
Family patriarch Bernard Arnault, who is occasionally the richest man on Earth when the market is right or Elon Musk is being an idiot, has five children, all of whom work for LVMH. And of course, they endlessly bicker about it, at least according to behind-the-scenes rumors. Publicly, the elder Arnault has plans to divide the company equally between his five loser children.
The behind-the-scenes drama has been compared to that seen on the show Succession and involves, among other things, family gatherings where Arnault will grill his children on prepared topics to discern their suitability for leadership and make cryptic statements in public about who will run his empire when he dies in front of his children, seemingly just as a power play.
1. The Walton Family
Total worth: About $250 billion
How they made it: Walmart, baby!
On a list of families who own stakes in some of the most exclusive brands available for sale, it’s kinda weird to think that one of the wealthiest families around made their money from Walmart.
Arguably some of the most powerful folks in America, the remaining Walton heirs are privately worth billions and collectively more than some countries, and all of this wealth is the result of the hard work of one man: founder Sam Walton’s accountant.
Now we all know the ultra-wealthy avoid tax, but the extent to which the Waltons have done so is ridiculous in the extreme. Described as abusing and “exploiting [numerous] complex loopholes in the tax code,” the Waltons have managed to avoid paying literally billions in taxes by, to grossly simplify it for the sake of brevity, abusing things like trusts, to basically pay no taxes on their wealth while still having immediate access to it.
In essence, the Waltons have become the aristocrats of yore, passing down their tremendous wealth without paying any taxes on it, allowing each successive generation to continue sponging off of it whilst contributing nothing of any real material worth. At this point, we’d have a dragon sitting on top of a giant pile of gold running Walmart because at least when someone kills a dragon they can only take as much of its gold as they can carry.