The name Rothschild has become synonymous with wealth, and the story of this money-making
family started with a man called Mayer Amschel Rothschild. His beginnings were what you might
call humble, since he lived in a Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, Germany, sharing a house with
another 30 people. Both his parents died from smallpox when he was just 12 years old, and
prior to that it was their wish that he become a rabbi. That didn’t happen, and instead
at age just 13 the young Rothschild started an apprenticeship at a bank in Hanover. Through
his teens he practiced commodities and money-trading as well as sold rare coins. Through that he
rubbed shoulders with German nobility, and while he was working, he was also making children,
ten in all. Let’s now see what happened next, in this episode of the Infographics
Show, How much money do the Rothschilds have?
So, we know it all started with Mayer Amschel Rothschild. In fact, this man is sometimes
called “The founding father of international finance.” We know he had ten kids, and five
of those were sons. Each of these sons was responsible for running a finance house in
Europe’s centers of finance. This family, or empire, worked under the motto: Unity,
Integrity, Industry. We are told that understanding all the ways this family earned its fortune
is not exactly clear, with one journalist saying, “There is no book about them that
is both revealing and accurate. Libraries of nonsense have been written about them.”
We do know that war made the family rich, with the Rothschild making hay during a time
when the European sun shone on conflict after conflict. The family lent money to governments
to finance war and also had a hand in many industries. Before Mayer Rothschild left planet
Earth in 1812, he had thought up ways to keep all the money he and his sons had made by
maintaining a close knit family. According to an article in Discover magazine in 2003
called, “Go Ahead, Kiss Your Cousin,” the plan was for cousins to marry cousins,
thereby keeping the money in a close gene pool. That magazine tells us, “For generations
the Rothschild family had been inbreeding almost as intensively as European royalty.”
It also tells us, “Four of Mayer’s granddaughters married grandsons, and one married her uncle.
These were hardly people whose mate choice was limited by the distance they could walk
on their day off.”
We are told that of Mayer’s five sons it was the third that made the most cash. His
name was Nathan Mayer Rothschild. Nathan made a lot money funding infrastructure in Europe,
and this was a Europe that was growing at hyper-speed because of the industrial revolution.
He moved to the center of that revolution, England, in 1798. There he started a textile
business and also began trading on the London Stock Exchange. Soon enough he would have
his own bank, and that was called N M Rothschild & Sons Ltd. We are told that during the Napoleonic
Wars the bank pretty much financed Britain’s entire war effort. But lending money to governments
wasn’t the only way of making huge amounts of money. Insurance was a game that the Rothschilds
played. Nathan, along with a partner, founded the Alliance Assurance Company in 1824. The
Rothschild Archives tell us this was a direct challenge to Lloyds bank. The family were
busy to say the least, buying up expensive tracts of land in London, helping Brazil gain
its independence, financing massive projects such as the building of the Suez Canal, while
also using its capital to help the founding of some of the world’s biggest companies.
It also lent money to Japan, so it could finance its side of the Russo-Japanese War. Nathan,
now Lord Rothschild, had his finger in so many pies that he was sometimes called the
most powerful man in Britain.
It was Nathan who started the philanthropic activities of the Rothschilds. He had seven
kids of his own, each of whom either went into the business or spent much of their time
with the charity side of the business. This included building schools, libraries, hospitals,
orphanages and places where the old could live their dying years in peace.
But peace in the early 20th century was not exactly in the air. Investopedia tells us
there was in-fighting in the early 20th century, which was detrimental to the family wealth.
We are told that during WW2 the family also lost many properties, while the Nazis stole
millions of dollars’ worth of assets from the Rothschilds. Still, the family was never
exactly broke. We are told that these days the family fortune is still considerable,
and it still has its fingers in many, many pies, with finance, real estate, mining and
energy being some of the bigger pies. Some smaller businesses include things like owning
wineries, of which the Rothschild own quite a few on different sides of the world. The
family is also the proud owner of the one of the biggest art collections in the world,
and the mind boggles as to how much that collection is worth. There are many descendants in this
family, and the wealth stays with them. You can easily find a list of all these descendants,
and you’ll see that here are way too many people for us to discuss in detail.
For that reason adding up what the entire family is worth is no easy feat, but people
have tried do it. We might look at the Forbes richest people list, which has few Rothschilds
on it. Coming in at No. 84 for 2018 was a man called Benjamin de Rothschild, and it’s
said he has a net worth of about $1.7 billion. That’s enough not to stress about the electricity
bill and his three kids’ school fees, but in terms of billionaires he is nothing special.
But then Forbes tells us his job is to preside over the Edmond de Rothschild global finance
empire, and that is said to manage assets of up to $170 billion, including banks, hotels
and restaurants. Benjamin also owns, or part owns, vineyards in France, South Africa, Argentina
and New Zealand. And as we said, this is just one guy in a very big family.
No one Rothschild family member has an obscene amount of wealth, meaning no one Rothschild
is about to match the wealth of people such as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, but when you
add all those assets together it does come to a lot of money.
Searching for the magic number regarding the net worth of all the family you’ll find
sources that differ drastically. We found one site that said the entire family fortune
could be as much as 2 trillion dollars, but the website Bankrate believes it’s nowhere
near that amount. It says the Rothchild family net worth is closer to $400 billion, and again,
we must stress there are a lot of mouths to feed in this large family. Bankrate tells
us one of the big money spinners is the Rothschild Group investment firm, which pulls in around
$500 million a year.
Then you have all the conspiracy theory sites, and they tell a totally different story. One
such website tells us that the Rothschilds had a hand in the assassination of American
President John F. Kennedy, and that the family is worth an astounding five hundred trillion
dollars. Hmm. That particular site, one that seems to lack any kind of journalistic integrity,
tells us Jacob Rothschild is worth more than Bill Gates. This should be taken with a pinch
of salt until someone can offer serious counter evidence. Other resources tell us Jacob, the
82-year old British investment banker, is worth more like five billion dollars, which
pales in comparison to the Gates fortune.
Let’s see what those intrepid fact-finders over at Snopes tell us about the 500 trillion
figure. Well, the first thing you can read in that story is that the Rothschilds owning
such wealth is FALSE. It shows us an amusing meme of Jacob, who quite amusingly is made
to look just like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. Snopes tells us that the “grossly exaggerated”
wealth that some people talk about is another conspiracy tied up with paranoid platitudes
along the lines of the Jews run the world and the illuminati controls everything. Snopes
tells us when the 500 trillion number was first disseminated through the sometimes dishonest-heart
of the internet, the world’s wealth was reported at only $250 trillion. This, said
Snopes, is problematic. It certainly is. It sounds like a children’s math question.
“In the box there are 10 apples. Jane took four, Peter took two, Jacob took twenty. How
many apples are there left?” Snopes says that while many family members are indeed
rich, the Rothschilds don’t have anywhere near the global influence they used to have.
So, what are all these people worth, and we are talking about everything, all assets,
business, etc? Investopedia published two stories about this and each in its turn was
taken down with the website saying that the journalism was “inadequately sourced.”
One story said the family’s net worth was $350 billion and another said the family controlled
more than $2 trillion worth in assets. You can still see these numbers on other sites,
with links back to Investopedia. But as Investopedia wants nothing to do with these numbers, we
would be better looking elsewhere. CNBC you would think would do its homework
when adding up rich family wealth, but when it did its list it said it couldn’t include
families such as the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers because the wealth is just too diversified.
Ok, we are getting nowhere here, and the reason is because no reliable journalistic sources
have attempted to give us a number on this diversified wealth. If we look at Forbes rich
list again, Jacob Rothschild doesn’t even get on the list with his purported 5 billion.
We should add that it seems this number was first let loose by the website The Richest.
But on the Forbes list we have Benjamin, who we have already talked about, and also Jeff
Rothschild, who is said to be worth about $2.2 billion right now. You could call this
63-year old Silicon Valley resident a more modern kind of Rothschild as he made a ton
of money in tech, such as Facebook. But then it gets tricky, because his bio states he
is not part of the Rothschild family. It seems not everyone agrees with that statement, but
we’ll take him for his word.
So, how much is the family worth? The mining, the finance, the energy, the arts, the wine,
the properties? We must tell you that we don’t feel after our little investigation that we
could give you even a ballpark figure. The Financial Times doesn’t even dare to state
what it thinks the family is worth. Back in 2010 the newspaper said, “The ownership
structure is opaque, which makes it hard to estimate the family wealth, although it is
one of the richest in the world.”
We know the net worth of the family is many, many billions, but hundreds of billions, or
trillions? What we’d like to do now is ask you to give us a ballpark figure. Tell us
in the comments. Also, be sure to check out our other show This Is How Warren Buffett
Made $85 Billion. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and
subscribe. See you next time.