Billion-Dollar Brawls: Rich Families Fight Over Fortunes
Family feuds of the the super-rich have almost unimaginably high stakes.
Oct. 29, 2007 Special to ABCNEWS.com — -- Rich, dysfunctional families are back in vogue on prime-time television with new shows like Cane and Dirty Sexy Money. But these fictional families have nothing on the real-life tales of feuding billionaire clans, wracked by generational schisms, sibling rivalries, jealousy and greed.
For these wealthy dynasties, there just doesn't seem to be enough money in the world to convince them to get along. Instead they turn on each other, and very often, take their relatives to court.
Click here to see inside these billionaire family feuds at our partner site, Forbes.com.
We've recapped some of the most riveting billionaire family sagas of the past decade, including a then 19-year-old member of the Hyatt's Pritzker family, who successfully sued her father and almost a dozen other relatives, and a father and his beauty-queen fifth wife suing his son over the family fortune. Exactly half of our favorite feuds involved American families; other fights took place or are taking place in Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, India and Switzerland.
Even people who don't follow the sagas of the world's wealthiest most likely got a peek at one of recent history's most salacious feuds, involving former stripper and Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith. For a decade, the tabloid celebrity battled her much-older billionaire stepson, E. Pierce Marshall, for the right to inherit some of the fortune of her late husband, J. Howard Marshall, to whom she was married for just one year. Then, in a bizarre twist, E. Pierce Marshall and Smith died within months of one another. The case was still pending.
In 2002, Liesel Pritzker, then an undergrad at Columbia University, launched a $6 billion lawsuit against her father and 11 older cousins, accusing them of looting her trust funds and those of her brother Matthew. The battle eventually led to the carving up of the family fortune; it was split 11 ways, resulting in 10 more Pritzkers joining the Forbes 400; the most members of any family. Liesel and Matthew are not among the rich-listers, having received a reported $500 million apiece.
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