Not looking forward to the holiday weekend because bickering among your relatives makes family gatherings a bit tense? Just imagine if you were related to the Pritzkers, the billionaire family behind Hyatt Hotels and Resorts.
In 2002, Liesel Hyatt, then a Columbia University undergrad, sued almost a dozen relatives, including her dad, for $6 billion and dragged the dirty family linen into the limelight. The family settled last year at a cost of $1 billion.
Just last week, Cablevision System's Dolan family offered to take the cable giant private in a deal that would help get the family out of the public eye and might broker peace between father Charles and son James, who publicly fought this spring over a satellite venture.
Click here to see billionaire family feuds
If the deal is approved, Charles, who was on Forbes' list of the World's Richest People, would remain chairman of Cablevision while James would step down as chief executive, hold onto a board seat and become chief executive and chairman of Rainbow Media Holdings, a public spinoff that would include lucrative cable channels like Independent Film Channel and the sports businesses including the New York Knicks basketball team.
Family conflicts are as old as time (remember those feuding brothers Cain and Abel) and as common as fruit cake at Christmas time. But when billions of dollars are at stake, spats can get really dramatic and messy.
We've recapped five of the most riveting billionaire family sagas of the 21st century, including a couple of sibling rivalries (the Ambanis) and a case that involved a father and his beauty-queen fifth wife suing his son over the family fortune. And surprisingly only two of the five feuds involve American families.
Perhaps the biggest shocker is that there aren't more of these bitter fights, given the prevalence of big family businesses. According to a report published in The Journal of Finance by American University Professor Ronald Anderson and Temple University Professor David Reeb, founding families have substantial stakes in roughly one-third of the largest US companies including Ford Motor, Anheuser-Busch and Wal-Mart Stores and often perform better on average than non-family firms.
Maybe these folks are content with their accumulate power and wealth. Or maybe they are just better at keeping these matters within the family.
