Why would you do that to your own kin?
I don't know where/when it started. It seems like one of those ideas that mostly the bottom 99% of the income spectrum hold onto.
Why the super-rich aren’t leaving much of their fortunes to their kids https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/why-the-very-...
8 billionaires whose kids won’t inherit their fortunes, from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, to late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/31485...
Gates has stated publicly he plans to leave each child $10 million.
Buffet has stated publicly that his kids will only get $2 billion each.
Articles like the ones you've posted are just fuel for a false narrative.
There are lots of people in this world who have grown up wealthy and aren't anything close to the spoiled brat you are describing.
The kids go to prestigious private schools, where they get a better education than you, then get propelled into jobs that simply aren't available to most, like politics, or non-profit boards, and the like. Some will end up taking jobs basically recreationally, like my billionaire highschool teacher. They might be somewhat entitled, in the sense that they don't feel that their life of largely leisure is undeserved, but in our current economic system they're regularly told they're not wrong.
These are the terrifying rich, and the ones that are actively running the world. They're effectively checked out from the money economy, and spend their time primarily in the power economy. The illusion that "oh, rich kids grow up to be spoiled, ineffectual brats" only works to their benefit.
It's noticeably distinct from the feeling of "you can never truly fail" which is more common with the upper middle class and seems be significantly better for your long-term mental health.
I don't think this means you need to actually not leave your children gobs of money, but in my experience it certainly helps to act like you're not for the duration of your kids' childhood.
There's this really insidious meme that just because their parent(s) made astronomically absurd amounts of money, children should be able to spend their entire lives doing nothing productive, treating regular people like shit, and wrecking the environment all in the name of enjoying themselves.
I genuinely believe that every human being should be given the means to survive without having to work for it—even a bit more, because psychological needs are a thing, too. The vast majority of people have an innate drive to do something, to contribute to our world, to make other people's lives better, to create something real.
Being given enough money that you can just pop from NYC to Paris on a whim on the family private jet—or even just buy a new jet to do so, because the other jet is in use—is entirely different.
Being disconnected from work, and from people without enough money to treat other humans like animals, is genuinely an unhealthy thing.
If you don't want your billions of dollars I'll happily take them of your hands.
How do they know what they want?
There's a LCD across humans, the bare minimum - a place to live, food, and clothes.
I'd rather give them the option if possible.
It's easy to answer a question when there's no exclusive options.
By the way, when you have an option of cashing out at 700million (and killing your business) OR continuing to build a business that genuinely provides something good for the society (albeit maybe not as profitably), do think first what kind of lesson you are giving your kids when you make that choice. You may provide them with the money but not much meaning to spend that money in a good way.