Cornelius "the Commodore" Vanderbilt built the largest fortune in American history through shipping and railroads, leaving an estate worth more than the entire U.S. Treasury when he died in 1877 — equivalent to well over $100 billion today.
His son doubled the fortune, but subsequent generations spent it building some of the largest private homes ever constructed in America, including multiple Fifth Avenue mansions and the 250-room Biltmore Estate, while living on a scale of extravagance — parties, yachts, servants — that no income could sustain indefinitely.
By 1973, when 120 Vanderbilt descendants gathered for a family reunion at Vanderbilt University, not a single one was a millionaire, according to the family's own historian. Most of the great Vanderbilt mansions had already been demolished decades earlier because no one could afford to keep them.
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