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
- Hastings, Star Wars creator George Lucas and CNN founder Ted Turner have all joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s philanthropic The Giving Pledge
- Meanwhile, Hollywood millionaire Daniel Craig – star of James Bond film Casino Royale – has said he finds inheritance ‘quite distasteful’
Being born to ultra-rich parents has many perks. Children of billionaires, and sometimes even future generations, often get a hefty inheritance from their wealthy parents. But many business moguls, like Bill Gates and Ted Turner, aren’t planning to keep their riches in the family. Instead, they plan to donate their fortunes to charity and want to teach their kids the value of hard work.
Ted Turner: US$2.3 billion
Turner, media magnate and founder of CNN, has signed the The Giving Pledge – a campaign to encourage extremely wealthy people to contribute most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. He is known to have donated US$1 billion to the United Nations.
He started work from an early age at his father’s insistence, who owned a billboard business called Turner Outdoor Advertising, which he took over in 1963 after his father’s death. He made US$7.5 billion in 1996 when he sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner, according to The New York Times.
Turner, who has been married and divorced three times (his most famous marriage was to actress Jane Fonda), has five children who will not be inheriting all of his vast net worth. According to CNN, Turner was named “among 40 billionaires pledging half or more of their fortune to charity through The Giving Pledge campaign”.
The CNN founder is also the second-largest landowner in the US, with an estimated 810,000 hectares (two million acres) of land. He uses a lot of his land for ranches to re-popularise bison meat, amassing the largest herd in the world. He also has his own steakhouse chain called Ted’s Montana Grill that serves, well, bison.
Reed Hastings: US$5.7 Billion