BLOOD AND BILLIONS

The Psychology of Succession Wars and the Collapse of Family Dynasties

This is Book 2 of the Extreme Wealth Investigation Series, exploring the psychology of the ultra-rich, and the hidden conflicts that shape their fortunes. (Book 1: The Deadly Side of Billionaire Living by Arthur B. Crown)
They built empires worth billions. Then they died. What happened next is the real story.
Brooke Astor — one of New York's most beloved philanthropists, who died at 105 in the place she had always wanted to be, but not before a decade of managed isolation that her own legal documents had failed to prevent.
Huguette Clark — heiress to one of the great Gilded Age copper fortunes — chose to live in a hospital room for twenty years while her nurse received $31 million in gifts, her attorney wrote checks from her accounts to Israeli settlements where his daughters lived, and her three Manhattan apartments sat dark and empty. She was never declared incompetent. The fortune built by her father across a lifetime of Montana mining was redistributed to the people in the room while the people outside it sent Christmas cards that were never answered.
John du Pont shot an Olympic gold medalist in his own driveway. He had been the most dangerous person inside Foxcatcher Farm for years before anyone said so out loud.
The book is about what great fortunes do to rich families that hold them — not during the building, but after. The succession. The moment the person who built the system is no longer present to run it, and everything that was held in place by their specific gravity begins to move.
Crown examines twenty-seven cases across a century of American and global wealth: the Caldwell murders at Glensheen mansion, where a disabled heiress was killed in her bed and her nurse beaten to death on the grand staircase because eight million dollars was coming but not coming fast enough. The final years of Howard Hughes, who purchased the removal of every corrective signal from his environment until he weighed ninety pounds and watched the same film more than 150 times in a sealed room. Robert Durst, who constructed private worlds sophisticated enough to contain three suspected deaths for thirty-three years until a bathroom microphone caught him saying what the investigators had always believed. Travis Kalanick, who built Uber using methods his board financed, and received the letter while he was in Chicago doing exactly what they had asked him to do. Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott — the $38 billion divorce that Washington community property law made possible because no one had thought, in January 1993, to write a prenuptial agreement. Harold Hamm and the $975 million check his ex-wife rejected and then deposited three days later, forfeiting her appeal.
The cases span corporate boardrooms and estates maintained for decades by people who had not visited them. They include Sumner Redstone's super voting shares that could not protect him from the people inside his house. Bernard Lafferty, the barely literate butler who became Doris Duke's sole individual executor and then died in a Bel Air mansion she had paid for. Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall — nineteen years of litigation, four courts, and a daughter who received nothing. The Pritzker cousins and their $15 billion family enterprise, dismantled forty years ahead of schedule because the governance Jay Pritzker had built to hold it together could not survive his absence. Conrad Hilton, who left almost everything to Catholic charitable institutions and almost nothing to his children, including the daughter from his marriage to Zsa Zsa Gabor, who received $100,000. The Barnes Foundation, stripped from its physical home by the board its founder never intended to govern it. Alfred Nobel's will, which should never have been honored and became the most consequential philanthropic instrument in history because two men decided to fight for it.
The book about bad luck, but about a specific, repeating, entirely predictable failure.