In 1810, an eleven-year-old named Cornelius Vanderbilt borrowed $100 from his mother to start a ferry service in New York harbor. By the time he died in 1877, he had built that loan into a railroad and shipping empire worth more than $100 million, making him the richest man in America. His son, William Henry Vanderbilt, doubled the fortune within a decade and briefly became the wealthiest man in the country himself.

What the family never built was a plan to keep it. There was no trust, no family governance, no shared discipline passed down alongside the money. Heirs spent freely on mansions, yachts, and the lavish parties that came to define the Gilded Age, while the railroads that generated the wealth went increasingly unmanaged by a generation better at spending fortunes than building them. 

Within thirty years of Cornelius’s death, no Vanderbilt ranked among the wealthiest Americans. Within fifty years, the fortune was effectively gone. At a 1973 family reunion, 120 Vanderbilt descendants gathered and not one of them was a millionaire. 

Gloria Vanderbilt, Cornelius’s great-great-granddaughter, died in 2019 with an estate of roughly $1.5 million, most of which passed to her son, journalist Anderson Cooper, who has said he has no intention of leaving a fortune to his own child.