THE TOP TEN BILLIONAIRE FAMILIES ENJOYING AMERICA

May 2, 2023 -Durt Fibo

Yesterday was May Day, also recognized as International Workers’ Day. Today we shall show you not the ‘flip side of that coin,’ but the actual coin itself. During our sojourn in the USA, while dodging bullets or scalpings by the citizens of the land of the ‘Free Market’, we have compiled a reckoning of the 10 wealthiest families in America.

By “families” we refer to legacy riches and their complimentary powers -not such nouveau riche sots like the man in Twitter, or Amazon, or in mid-stratosphere. Note that our gallery has been assembled from data sifted by Forbes, Bloomberg, et al -and is as current as May1, 2023 in fact.

1. The Walton family

Not John-boy and the other wallabies, but the TV-shy family lurking behind Walmart. Net worth: $56.7 billion. Source of wealth: Walmart. Eleven days before the end of last year, Walmart announced it met the first threshold required for finalizing the company’s $3.1 billion nationwide opioid settlement framework decided the month before. The lawsuit against their contribution to the creation of the opioid crisis dulled their image, but not their upstanding American values: selling overpriced pharmaceuticals and snack-objects designed to shorten your life while you become a 300-kilo diabetic stuck to an electric cart as you wait in their pharmacy’s long pickup line (known as Purgatory).

2. The Koch family

David has been deceased since 2019, but brother Charles Koch remains at large and ravenous. Net worth: $129 billion. Source of wealth: Koch Industries, which internationally controls sewerage choking with both industrial and consumer excreta including chemicals. fertilizers, fossil fuel products, oil and gas explorations, pipelines, refining, forestry and timber products, industrial glass, electronics, cattle and game ranching, stock market hijinks and over 50 years of herding the Republican Party and its nano-viruses such as their original Tea Party ‘movement’.

3. The Mars family

Presently confected by Jacqueline Mars. Net worth: $94 billion. Source of wealth: Mars Inc. Jacqueline and John Mars inherited their stake in Mars Inc., which invented M&Ms, Milky Way, and Mars Bars, when their father died in 1999. The company rakes in over $40 billion in annual revenue. Yet they cackled like witches as they jacked up the price of candy more than 13.1% between September 2021 and September 2022 –the high point of Covid Halloween.

4. The Cargill-MacMillan family

Headed by Martha MacMillan. Net worth: $65 billion. Source of wealth: Cargill Inc. Cargill is an agribusiness giant that also dabbles in pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, logistics, financial services, and even “beauty” and “personal care products,” all of which generated over $150 billion in revenue in 2022. Cargill is a tad less boastful about their famous adventures in environmental pollution, deforestation, fatal food poisonings, and forced child labor. An estimated 23 members of the Cargill-MacMillan family hold a total of 88% of this energetic company, at least 14 of them personally billionaires.

5. The Lauder family

Ronald and brother Leonard Lauder and family –think Kray brothers. Net worth: $40 billion. Source of wealth: Estée Lauder Companies Inc. The multinational Estée Lauder markets more than 20 distinct brands of cosmetics and fragrances (e.g: Aramis, MAC, Aveda, and Clinique), and reported its annual revenue for 2022 as over $17 billion. It’s expensive making people look cheap. The conglomerate also boasts its own Corporate Global Real Estate Operations, which buys and sells multi-million-dollar estates throughout the world, including the highly uncoveted Rush Limbaugh $155 million Palm Beach compound two months ago, and which first proposed buying Greenland to Donald Trump. Ronald Lauder is another permanent donor to the Republican Party and particularly partial to the Trumpian rump.

6. The SC Johnson family

Herbert Fisk Johnson III. Net worth: $37 billion. Source of wealth: SC Johnson & Son, is famous mainly for its American-style household cleaning products, such as Drano, Pledge, Mr. Muscle, Glade, Windex, and Toilet Duck. When the founder’s son, Herbert Fisk Johnson, perished in 1928 without a will, the remaining family took at one another with the heirloom cutlery until it was eventually divided between his two children, Herbert Fisk Johnson Jr. and Henrietta Johnson Louis. Herbert Fisk Johnson III eventually became CEO in 2004. His personal net worth stands at around $3.5 billion.

7. The (Edward) Johnson family

Abigail Pierrepont Johnson. Net worth: $36 billion. Source of wealth: Fidelity Investments and Fidelity International. As President and CEO since 2014, Abigail herself retains almost 25% of the firms’ stakes, with a total of around 49% held by the family as a whole (six eager spawn). The tangled enterprises form one of the largest multinational “financial services” ops on earth. Their portfolio brandishes such terrors as mutual funds, asset management, investment consultation, a brokerage firm, index funds, and life insurance. In 2022, the company generated over $25 billion in revenue. Abigail has fortuitously served on the Committee on Markets Regulation, and on the Board of Directors of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Johnson’s personal wealth is approximately $22.6 billion.

8. The Cox family

James Cox Kennedy. Net worth: $34.5 billion. Source of wealth: Cox Enterprises. The fully-private Cox Enterprises owns Manheim Auctions, the global Cox Automotive, and, naturally, Cox Communications –the third-largest cable television provider in America (eg: television and radio stations, digital media, newspapers, and advertising sales rep firms). Last year Cox Enterprises also bought Axios Media for $525 million. The combine reports some $20 billion in average annual revenues. In 2014 the founder’s grandson, Jamie Cox Kennedy, and the founder’s great-grandson, Alex Taylor, were enthroned on the company’s board of directors. Concerning its flagship newspaper – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution – former reporter Maria Saporta accused it of “inaccuracies” and “a definitive anti-Atlanta and anti-poverty-fighting slant…Sadly, the AJC has a bias editor – an editor meant to remove all liberal biases within the newspapers news pages. Unfortunately, the newspaper has no bias editor to filter out the Fox News, conservative babble that distorts the information in those same pages.” James Cox Kennedy’s personal worth hovers around $8.2 billion. Taylor’s is commonly noted as more than $1 billion.

9. The Pritzker family

Penny Pritzker. Net worth: $14,15 billion (see list of group operations). Source of wealth: Hyatt Hotels Corporation, PSP Partners, PSP Capital Partners, Pritzker Realty Group, Artemis Real Estate Partners, Inspired Capital. Pritzker is the biological result of the Pritzker entrepreneurs who blasted Hyatt Hotels to its supernal peak. Those same visionaries – Donald, Jay, and Robert – also raised aloft the Marmon Group, Donald was the actual father of the girl he presciently named “Penny.” The family as a family resembles a loose constellation of 13 mutually-repelling heirs, almost every one a billionaire. In her own light, Penny said: let there be PSP Partners, which embraces all the many life-eating corporate divisions listed above, excepting (perhaps) Inspired Capital, which was created by Penny Pritzker and Alexa von Tobel in 2019. This goes a long way to explain the difficulties of adducing the Pritzker family’s net worth. The PSP groupings (a “diversified global investment firm”) claim to specialize in “Buyouts, Venture Capital and Real Estate”, yet somehow report $2 billion of net worth. Hyatt Hotels reported over $5 billion in annual revenue in 2022. As confusing as this sounds, it was evidently pure magic to President Obama, who appointed her Secretary of Commerce for the term 2013 to 2017. Towards the end of 2021, Forbes estimated Penny’s own net worth at $3.2 billion.

10. The Newhouse family

Donald Newhouse and Samuel Irving Newhouse, plus klingons. Net worth: $30 billion. Source of wealth: Advance Publications. Donald and Samuel’s father began buying up local and/or lowbrow newspapers in 1932 and consolidated them into Advance Publications Inc in 1949, then continued to consume publications until his death, after which he could no longer read, or count money. But before that point, he had already bought Conde Nast and all its publications for a mere $5 million. While Advance remains a privately-held corporation, it has bloated to include ownership of The New Yorker, Wired, and Vogue, among many others, and is a leading shareholder in Reddit, Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc., and Charter Communications – which is in charge of randomly cutting out your cable, phone and internet services (at more than double the cost of most other countries). Donald’s net worth is set at $15 billion this year, and Samuel’s was at $13 billion when he died of delight in 2017.