Cracks In The Facade
Ferdinand Lundberg said that industrialist families tend to work in combination, and I would say that's generally true, but Lundberg at the time he published The Rich and the Super-Rich in 1968 was still living in a culture dominated by the post-Civil War robber barons' desendants. The major industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lumber, mining, steel, railroads, oil, and automobiles were still staples of the economy, with air transport on the rise. Computers still used punch cards. One of Lundberg's main theses, in fact, was that more recent fortunes made from the 1920s onward were mostly hype, and few new industrialists of the 1950s and 60s started from scratch -- their opportunities arose because their families were already wealthy, and a closer look would show that modern fortunes were often smoke and mirrors. This was before the rise of authentic new multibillionaires like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. While the super-rich do often w...