For nearly eight years, Sonn served the Getty sisters as an adviser and a confidante, until the relationship underwent a spectacular rupture. In a lawsuit filed last March, Kendalle’s lawyers accused Sonn of “unjust enrichment,” saying that she “coerced” her client into promising a bonus worth millions of dollars. In a countersuit, Sonn accused the Gettys and their advisers of retaliating for her opposition to a “dubious tax avoidance scheme” that could save them as much as $300 million. Robert Leberman, the administrator of the trust, and one of the defendants in Sonn’s suit, denied her allegations against the family. In a statement, he said that Sonn’s firing had been “non-retaliatory and warranted,” and that the suit was a “sad example of overreaching by someone now seeking to take advantage of a position of trust.”
As it moved through the courts, Sonn’s complaint, which contained portions of family e-mails and texts, marked the rarest of indiscretions from a financier who serves the super-rich. Wealth managers like to say, “A submerged whale does not get harpooned.” In this case, one of their own was allowing one of America’s richest clans to heave into view.
The arc of an American fortune, it is often said, goes from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Other cultures have similar admonitions. The Japanese version is bleak: “The third generation ruins the house.” The Germans dwell on the mechanics: “Acquire it, inherit it, destroy it.”
And yet, in recent times, the fortunes of many prominent American clans have soared. Between 1983 and 2020, the net worth of the Kochs, who prospered in fossil fuels and became right-wing mega-donors, grew twenty-five-fold, from $3.9 billion to $100 billion. The Mars-family fortune, which began in the candy business, grew by a factor of thirty-six, to $94 billion. The Waltons, of Walmart, expanded their fortune forty-four-fold, to $247 billion. The financial triumph of such clans helps explain how the imbalance of wealth in the United States has risen to levels unseen in a century. In 1978, the top 0.1 per cent of Americans owned about seven per cent of the nation’s wealth; today, according to the World Inequality Database, it owns eighteen per cent.
A century ago, American law handled the rare pleasure of a giant inheritance with suspicion. Instead of allowing money to cascade through generations, like a champagne tower, we siphoned off some of the flow through taxes on estates, gifts, and capital gains. As the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1927, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” But, since the late seventies, American politics has taken a more accommodating approach to dynastic fortunes—slashing rates, widening exemptions, and permitting a vast range of esoteric loopholes for wealthy taxpayers. According to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the average tax rate on the top 0.01 per cent has fallen by more than half, to about thirty per cent, while rates for the bottom ninety per cent have climbed slightly, to an average of twenty-five per cent.