The Forbes’ list of the richest families in America.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Forbes magazine’s annual list of the richest families in America was released on Thursday, and while it includes just about all the usual suspects, not a single Indian American household made it onto the rankings.
However, Asian American families did land a spot on the coveted list. The Chao family, which is involved with “chemicals” in Houston, and is said to be worth around $4.3 billion, ranked #62.
The vast majority of the list is dominated by Caucasian families, with Wal-Mart’s Walton family landing the top spot with an estimated net worth of $152 billion. That’s a huge margin over the #2 spot holder, the Koch family, which has about $89 billion in assets to their name.
Number three is the Mars candy family with $60 billion, #4 is the Cargill-MacMillan publishing family with $43 billion, and #5 is the Edward Johnson family with $43 billion. The rest of the top 10 is made up of the Hearst family (#6, $35 billion), the Cox family (#7, $32 billion), the Pritzker family (#8, $29 billion), the S.C. Johnson family (#9, $25.5 billion), and the Duncan family (#10, $25.4 billion).
“To value their fortunes we added up their assets, including stakes in public and private companies, real estate, art and cash, and took into account estimates of debt. For those with publicly traded holdings, we used stock prices from the close of trading on June 20, 2014,” says Forbes, to explain the rankings. “We excluded any assets irrevocably pledged to charitable foundations. In cases where a company had been sold years ago, we applied a conservative rate of appreciation for the cash, after deducting for capital gains taxes.”
The aggregate wealth of all these families put together is a stunning $1.2 trillion. To put that number in perspective, US GDP for 2012 was estimated at $15.68 trillion, meaning that the 185 families listed by Forbes make up about 7.65% of the country’s entire Gross Domestic Product on their own.
“The three richest families are worth $301 billion, one fourth of cumulative net worth of all the wealthiest families,” says Forbes.
The full list can be read on Forbes’ website.
1 Comment
The Yoh family are not Asian-American as this article inaccurately states.