The World’s Richest Families: From Arab Gulf Royalty to the Hermès Dynasty

The elite club of the world’s wealthiest families has crowned a new star: the ruling family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.

For the first time, the royal Al Nahyans of Abu Dhabi, the glossy capital of the Arabian Gulf country, top Bloomberg's list of the planet’s richest families, with an estimated $305 billion fortune. Their rise marks a dramatic shift for America’s Walton family, whose nearly $260 billion fortune from its stake in retailer Walmart Inc. fell to second place after years in the top spot.

Abu Dhabi ruler His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, known as MBZ, is also president of the UAE, a confederation of seven emirates. His brother, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is the country’s national security advisor, and oversees investment companies and the UAE’s roughly $790 billion sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the main sovereign wealth fund of the country’s Arab capital. 

Both brothers are sons of His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who founded the UAE in 1971 and was known for his love of falconry. The family has overseen Abu Dhabi’s metamorphosis from a landscape of mud-brick huts, camel herding, fishing and pearling into to an oasis of luxury apartment skyscrapers, mega-malls, golf courses and 5-star hotels since crude oil was discovered in an old pearling bed in 1958.

Humble beginnings also marked the rise of Sam Walton, the founder of the world’s largest retailer who was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, to farming parents a decade before the Great Depression. His surviving children with his wife Helen Walton — Alice L. Walton, Jim C. Walton and S. Robson Walton — own nearly 47% of the multinational company, according to the retailer’s latest proxy filing to securities regulators. But their dynastic fortune slipped to the number-two spot as publicly traded shares in the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer, which had $601 billion in global sales last year, have wobbled amid muted outlooks for consumer spending.

The Gardener

In third place is the family that founded and now owns the majority of Hermès, the French luxury goods label that began in 1837 as a purveyor of leather harnesses and other riding gear to the well-heeled. With a fortune of nearly $151 billion, descendants collectively own more than two-thirds of the luxury-goods maker. 

Some of that money may not stay in the family: English-language news outlets have cited a Swiss newspaper’s Dec. 7 report that Nicolas Puech, a fifth-generation descendant of founder Thierry Hermès, was planning to adopt his 51-year-old gardener so that he could pass on his $11 billion fortune to him.

Research shows that generational wealth tends to dissipate within three generations, a dynamic detailed by The Messsenger. But the families in the Bloomberg report go back as many as eight generations, avoiding what wealth advisor John Messervy calls the primary reasons families lose their fortunes over time — “multiple unresolved conflicts, family litigation, divorce and far too much energy spent on inter/intra generational differences.”

In fourth place with just under $142 billion are the heirs to the Mars candy fortune, which includes M&Ms and Snickers.

Next is the Al Thani family of Qatar, with $133 billion. The dynasty, which has ruled since 1825, dominates the Gulf country’s economy and politics, research by Harvard Divinity School shows. Qatar is the world’s richest country per capita, thanks to its vast oil and gas reserves, according to Global Finance magazine.

The world’s richest individual, Elon Musk, has more wealth than all the top family dynasties except the Al Nahyans and the Waltons. The X (former Twitter) and SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO is worth $245 billion, Forbes’ real-time billionaires tracker shows. Collectively, the 25 richest families thumb-nailed by Bloomberg grew $1.5 trillion richer this year.

But sometimes, heirs feel guilty.

Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who co-founded the Walt Disney entertainment company with his brother Walt, told the Financial Times in 2019 that she was worth $120 million, thanks to her legacy. She penned an op-ed for The Atlantic in 2021 saying that she shouldn’t have inherited her fortune. 

“When you come into money as I did — young, scared, and not very savvy about the world — you are taught certain precepts as though they are gospel: Never spend the “corpus” (also known as the capital) you were left,” she wrote.

“Steward your assets to leave even more to your children, and then teach them to do the same. And finally, use every tool at your disposal within the law, especially through estate planning, to keep as much of that money as possible out of the hands of government bureaucrats who will only misuse it.”