I read a New Yorker article recently about the Getty Family office, Vallejo Investments, that estimated they control $6 trillion in assets. Trillion! And here we are worrying about the billionaires.
With these kinds of wealth accumulation strategies, and hidden wealth through family offices, these people have more than enough power to control absolutely everything in our societies from the shadows.
"That lucrative maneuvering is the realm of specialized attorneys, accountants, and money managers, many of whom work for family offices: in-house financial teams that typically include a dozen or so full-time attendants. Family offices, which have roots in nineteenth-century operations that served John D. Rockefeller and a handful of his peers, have proliferated in the past two decades, to at least ten thousand worldwide. They tend to have no public presence—Gordon Getty’s family office is known, inconspicuously, as Vallejo Investments—but by some estimates they control about six trillion dollars in assets, a larger sum than is managed by all the world’s hedge funds."
By some estates. Yeah ok. There's absolutely zero actual evidence to suggest the Getty family controls even a hundred billion in assets. No major wealth investigators (Forbes, Bloomberg to name two) in the past three decades has turned up such a large stash by that family.