What The Misery Of Logan Roys Offspring Says About Inherited Wealth

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Perhaps the saddest and most telling moment of the end of the estate came in the boardroom, where Kendall Roy, daughter of recently deceased media mogul Logan Roy, turned down the takeover offer, asking his sister Shiva to succeed his father. Instead of a corporate empire.

Kendall has spent her entire life waiting for this moment. “I'm like a cog made for a single machine,” he says sadly. If he can't do that, he's useless.

After Shiva returns to his older brother's council (spoiler alert), the family's snarkmaster, younger brother Roman Roy, warns Kendall that all of Roy's siblings are "wrong": "We are nothing." Four children became extremely wealthy, but none of them was able to develop a personality other than that of their expert father.

I've recognized this disease from the two years I spent talking to the super-rich and their heirs and lackeys for my 2021 book on America's Crazy Wealth.

The wealth of the "creators" experienced greater wealth than those who inherited it. Imagine, if you will, growing up in a cocoon of luxury where great things are expected of you, but failure - and the lessons that come with it - are not allowed because appearances must be kept up. When a child's success is used as a benchmark for parents. (Usually men.) And where huge piles of cash act like a tug that keeps belligerent loved ones close and hard to escape.

Although Roy's older brother, Connor, has given up on following in his father's footsteps, he has always been in Logan's shadow, drowned in the bubble created by his father's wealth and as removed from reality as he thought he could be. Make a meaningful offer. President

One of the sources for my book is "Elizabeth", a successful Silicon Valley executive who regularly crosses paths with very wealthy people and has friends who have inherited large sums of money. "It makes adults mature. Same environment with everyone," he said. Their lives were "very dark" and their "relationship with them was very complicated. There was a terrible strangeness affecting the lives of those who knew they would be the heirs".

We are not talking here about opinion-level assets. The same disease affects families to a much lesser extent - 30 million, to put it mildly. Another source, Michael, had to take several years off from his doctoral program to deal with family financial issues after the death of his very wealthy father. His father, unlike Logan Roy, was a very bad man, but he gave Michael and his sisters privileges - generous stocks, cars, apartments, houses - that Michael never got.

Perhaps this gift made him miserable, and Michael dealt with his anxiety by spending his lavish sums of money - classic retail therapy - and racking up credit card debt in a futile attempt. to improve. His father's unpleasant bigotry also complicated Michael's relationship with his wife, whose (admittedly) modest marriage did not last.

At the annual Concours d'Elegance classic car show on 18th Street in Pebble Beach, I spoke to the man who proudly displays more Ferraris than my house. Some are mid-level entrepreneurs building boring but profitable businesses. And then there are the 20s and 30s who, instead of following their whims, decide to put their hands in their father's ATM. They think that's the life they want, but I feel like that might not be the case.

Another source, an author I'll call Martha, inherited such a fortune that she could easily afford a private jet, a chauffeured Bentley, a number of fantastic lottery items. Her money came from her late grandfather's financial services company, with which she had no involvement or knowledge, and it was her great misfortune to blow the jackpot so easily.

Martha was raised more modestly than herself - privileged upper middle class - and managed to consciously deny her status for years. Finally, as a middle-aged woman who was soon to be married, when she found out all the details, she exploded. Even remembering that moment of discovery brought tears to her eyes. "It's embarrassing and I want to cry because it's a fantasy. I have a fantasy in my drawer," he told me, "You'll be full of gold. How does that Couldn't that be the best news?"

His vast fortune, with much more to come, makes him feel real and isolated. He also played a major role in the breakdown of her marriage. And it saved him from the financial difficulties and compromises that most families face. In the narrow circle of the writer's friends, who did not discuss this serious wealth with him, he often felt like an impostor.

For most of us, the lack of wrestling seems pretty big. That's what we're looking for, isn't it? If we have enough money, we can do what we want and are no longer slaves to daily worries. At the same time, our culture – and even our psychology – makes the lack of struggle a double-edged sword.

Jeff, the former Chicago attorney I interviewed for the book, retired from the legal profession in his 40s after the death of his parents left him and his wife with a huge windfall. "I was in the middle ages of modern feminism where men were judged on their earning potential," she told me. "Am I doing anything worthwhile if I don't make more money, build a reputation, and build a professional life?"

Elizabeth experiences the same ambiguity as described. "When you don't have to make money, it's easy to change direction. I do one job for a while, then another," he says. And even though he never felt guilty, he felt "off the hook" for a long time. When people asked him, as they always did, what he had done, "I didn't feel comfortable talking about it," Jeff recalled. "It's hard to talk about what I do, that I don't have to work for the money. I'm always worried about how people will react. There are definitely self-esteem issues. self. What will people think of me? Maybe I think I'm not enough?"

He keeps on. Another source I will mention Jonathan made a lot of money. He worked on himself for years and sometimes failed, but he eventually managed to create an online coaching company which he eventually sold - landing a $40 million contract. Soon his thoughts shifted from starting a business to protecting his wealth and worrying about how he might lose it: "Now you're ruled by fear," I was told. he says.

He also felt alive in a cage with golden bars. His wife's father also sold the business, leaving his children with an even greater fortune. There is no turning back, and while Jonathan's existence may seem glamorous to the outside world, there are no "big adventures" in his life - just mundane, everyday hardships that seem sometimes extraordinary but help us to make sense of it.

We saw a lot of problems at Royce World. Indeed, excessive alcohol and drug use, relationship breakdowns, and mental health problems are real, not universal, but very common characteristics among the children of the wealthy. Indeed, there is growing evidence that children from high-income families are at equal or greater risk than children from low-income families in a variety of acts of substance abuse and antisocial behavior, even when they are bad scapegoats and we label them pathologically. . (Children raised by middle-income parents are the least vulnerable).

This discovery was a revelation for Sunya Luther, who, as a young psychologist at Yale University, discovered this area of ​​research and made it the focus of her career. "It's intuitive for me," he says. "It never occurred to me to say that children like mine are not at great risk, maybe they are at greater risk than poverty."

For example, in 2017, his team reported that the cohort of high-income children the researchers followed in high school had been diagnosed with drug and/or alcohol addiction two to three times higher than the national average. . “A lot of suffering, a lot of addictions and suicides” in wealthy communities, Luther told me. And "many of them go unnoticed, apparently, because the parents don't want to point out that such a tragedy has happened in the family".

Tracy Gary remembers her parents drinking at least two bottles of Scotch a day. They owned a yellow Rolls-Royce, a private jet, a helicopter and several estates, each with its own housekeeper. The wealth comes from the family's central telecommunications empire. His parents do not work. Her mother was a socialite, and she and "Poppy", technically her stepfather, traveled six months a year, shuttling between their estate and various charity events, leaving Tracy and her brother with nannies and governesses.

Gary was raised in wealth and opportunity, but feels isolated, alone and utterly miserable. In 1965, when he was 14, before sending him to an exclusive boarding school in Minnesota, his parents cornered him and told him they would give him and his brother a million dollars , which they would receive with interest at the age of 21. years. . They asked him to do something productive with this money. A million dollars invested in the S&P 500 index in 1965 would be worth hundreds of millions today.

But Gary, recognizing the family's wealth as the source of his unhappiness, does what Ray's kids can't. The tractor leaves the beam. Gary gave away all the money he had inherited and in doing so created a series of women's foundations. He is not poor. He ate well, lived in a modest home in Tiburon, California, and made his living advising wealthy families on philanthropy, donating most of the profits to charity.

But he basically burned the family safety net, Gary told me, and he was never happy. Roy's brothers took notes.

Ewan's speech - Logan's funeral | Old S4E9