I am sure you are familiar with John .D Rockefeller, as he is regarded as the richest American to ever live and was the founding member of the Three-comma Club since he was the first billionaire in the world's history. Although he didn't have 100's of billions like our recent tech billionaires, he was estimated to be worth 1 billion dollars at the height of his fortune but this was at the time when the entire United States GDP was 3 billion dollars annually. With this, it means that he had 3% of the nation's GDP, and if we are to look at with respect to the year 2020, he would be valued at over 450 billion dollars but then, there is a question, where is John's fortune?
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Similar to John, people and families like the Medici, and Rothschild have had their fortune become nothing after their passing and this can be blamed to the wealth being shared amongst their children and generation yet unborn but is this the case?
Actually, Rockefeller had 5 children and surely the fortune was going to be shared amongst them but also there were charitable contributions that were written to him and his business/estate. Trust that the money shared among his children still made them wealthy but then their family keeps increasing and their wealth is being split so the fortune is nowhere. But should heirs matter?
Although Rockefeller had 5 children, as at the time of his death, 2 of his children were already dead and so this sharing was going to be different. Let's also state that when the fortune will be shared, no one will be receiving money in cash, they will either be receiving it in family trust or shares. Since John's fortune were in shares then his children should be wealthy seeing that the price of the S&P500 increased 1000%, so if they had left their shares, they should be many times richer than the average billionaire today and if they had left it till our 2020s, then the total wealth of the then billionaire should be over 4 trillion dollars, so if they were to be shared amongst the 25 beneficiaries, they should still be very wealthy to be at the top 10 richest in the world.
Unlike all that I just said, the money didn't grow as we would expect, it got taken away from them, and it was difficult to follow track of the fortune. Rockefeller gave a large part of his fortune away in his lifetime and even more after he died and they were used to fund schools, museum, national parks, and so on. Just like their father, the children gave away half of their inheritance, so the money wasn't in the market on wall street where it was going to grow as a result of it being invested.
The direct beneficiaries of Rockefeller's fortune fortune are still billionaires but not up to 5 billion, and if we are to compare it to 100 years ago, they are far from being wealthy. Another thing that took their wealth away was Tax and Settlements. The family is still wealthy and most of their fortunes are in family owned companies that manage several trusts and they will not say how wealthy they are so for this, it is difficult to say how wealthy they are since their wealth cannot be tracked, and they will not give information for privacy sake, so there are possibilities that they are far wealthy than 5 billion dollars.