Gunpowder on the Brandywine, Standard Oil and a newspaper empire still clear $10bn apiece in 2026, yet the oldest fortune in America would fit inside the Walton family’s more than twenty-three times over.
Ask who the richest old-money family in America is and most people will answer with Rockefeller. The Rockefellers are on the 2026 list, but they sit close to its $10bn floor, and the families above them have older and newer claims to the title. Forbes estimates the Walton family at $520bn. It puts the du Ponts, whose business is the oldest on the entire ranking, at $22bn.
That works out to about four cents of du Pont money for every Walton dollar. The arithmetic of inherited wealth tends to run that way: a fortune that has been divided for two centuries ends up smaller than one that has been divided for two generations.
What counts as old money on Forbes’s richest families list?
The definition used here is a family whose founding business dates from before 1900. Every figure comes from Forbes’s 2026 America’s Richest Families ranking, which valued holdings at stock prices on 22 June 2026. The list admits only households worth $10bn or more, and it leaves out anyone already credited with a whole family fortune on the separate World’s Billionaires list. This edition is the second to use the $10bn threshold. The first list, in 2014, let in any family above $1bn.
The bar is high, and more families clear it every time. Fifty-four American families now clear $10bn apiece, nine more than two years ago, with $1.9tn between them. Ten of those households are on the list for the first time. Forty-nine of the 54 have reached a fourth generation or later, so “multi-generational” now describes almost every name on the list.
Founding date is the stricter test, and only a handful of families pass it.
How much are the du Ponts worth in 2026?
The story begins in 1802, when Eleuthère Irénée du Pont bought 95 acres on the Brandywine in Delaware and set up a powder works. No family business on this year’s ranking started earlier. Nine generations have carried the du Pont holding since then, and Forbes puts the family’s combined fortune at $22bn in 2026.
That figure is up from the $18.1bn Forbes estimated in 2024, when the du Ponts ranked 22nd of 45 families. The gain is about $3.9bn in two years, respectable growth for money that predates the Louisiana Purchase by a year.
The difficulty for any individual du Pont is the head count. Forbes counts the family at about 3,500 members. If the $22bn were divided equally, each would hold roughly $6.3m, enough for a comfortable life but nowhere near what the surname suggests. This dilution was already visible decades ago. When the first Forbes 400 appeared in 1982, it included 27 du Ponts, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, Forbes estimated that year that the 1,700 or so living descendants of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours shared a combined $10bn.
Over forty-four years, the family fortune has a little more than doubled while the number of people sharing it has roughly doubled too.
How rich is the Hearst family now?
William Randolph Hearst died in 1951, but the media fortune he built on nineteenth-century newspapers still supports his descendants. Forbes estimates the Hearst family at $21.8bn in 2026. That is down about $0.6bn from the $22.4bn it gave in 2024, when the Hearsts were America’s 14th richest family.
What sets the Hearsts apart is not the size of the fortune, which is close to the du Ponts’, but the number of people it is spread across. In 2024 Forbes counted about 67 living heirs. On those figures each share would be worth around $334m, more than fifty times the theoretical du Pont share, drawn from a pool of almost exactly the same size.
How much is the Rockefeller family worth today?
Standard Oil was founded in Ohio in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller and William Rockefeller Jr., and in 1916 John D. became America’s first billionaire, with a fortune estimated at $1.4bn when he died in 1937. Attempts to convert that into today’s money give answers ranging from tens of billions to several hundred billion, depending on which method the calculator prefers.
The present-day figure is better established. Forbes valued the family at $10.3bn in 2024, spread across about 200 members. Its 2026 estimate is $12.5bn, shared among descendants seven generations removed from Standard Oil. Other published estimates for 2026 come in nearer $11bn. In either case the family has moved off the $10bn floor, though not by a wide margin.
The fortune has survived largely because of how it was organised. Much of it is held in charitable trusts or divided among hundreds of descendants, and according to Deloitte the Rockefellers were the first family in the United States to set up a full-service single family office. That office has had to hold together a family that put 13 members on the 1982 Forbes 400.
David Rockefeller, John D.’s grandson, was the world’s oldest billionaire when he died in 2017 at the age of 101, with a net worth of around $3.3bn. On its own, that was nearly a third of what Forbes would assign to the whole family seven years later.
Who are the Smiths of Illinois Tool Works and Northern Trust?
This is the old-money family that tends to be left out of the familiar lists. Byron Smith founded the Northern Trust Corporation in Chicago in 1889 and co-founded Illinois Tool Works in 1912. His descendants are on the 2026 ranking, and the family name is too common to attract much attention.
According to Forbes, the family still owns at least 9% of Illinois Tool Works and 1% of Northern Trust. Those two stakes, in a bank founded in the 1880s and a manufacturer founded before the First World War, are the main reason the family remains on the list.
They also show how unglamorous a lasting fortune can be. The Smiths have kept a stake in industrial equipment and banking for well over a century, and that has been enough.
What happened to the Mellons, Gettys and Vanderbilts?
Their stories diverge, and none of them is on the 2026 list as far as anyone can confirm. The Mellon fortune has its roots in Pittsburgh banking, but DDW could not find a 2026 figure for the family, and whether the Mellons cleared the bar this year could not be confirmed.
The Getty position is clearer. The family dropped off Forbes’s list of America’s richest families almost a decade ago, despite having sold Getty Oil to Texaco for $10.1bn in 1984. A fortune can be very large at the moment it becomes cash and still be divided until it no longer qualifies.
The Vanderbilts are not on the list either, and they have not been for a long time. Of all the Gilded Age names, theirs is the one most often cited as proof that great fortunes can disappear completely.
Why are the Waltons, Kochs and Mars family so much richer?
According to Quartz’s reporting of the Forbes list, only three American families hold twelve-figure fortunes. Forbes puts the Waltons at $520bn, the Kochs at $157bn after a $41bn rise over two years, and the Mars family at $129bn after a $12bn gain. The Week, using a different table that ranks families worldwide, puts Mars at $148.2bn. The two figures come from different lists, compiled with different methodologies.
The main difference between these families and the old-money names is concentration. In February 2026 Walmart became the first brick-and-mortar retailer to reach a $1tn market capitalisation, and Forbes estimates that 41% of its stock is held by the families of seven heirs of Sam Walton and his brother Bud. Charitable trusts in the name of Sam’s son John Walton are estimated to own another 6%. A stake that large in a company that valuable is something no family on the old-money list now has.
The Kochs also keep control in very few hands. Charles Koch, 90, runs Koch, Inc. from Wichita as chairman and co-chief executive. According to Bloomberg, Frederick and William left the family business after a fraternal feud over control in the early 1980s, which left Charles and David in charge. Bloomberg also reports that part of the family’s wealth is managed through a family office, 1888 Management, and that members of the family bought a stake in the New York Giants in 2025 at a $10.3bn valuation.
That valuation is close to the Rockefellers’ entire 2024 fortune. Rockefeller money is spread across about 200 people, while the Kochs’ remains concentrated in one company run from one office.
Who is the richest old-money family in America?
Among the three families profiled here, Forbes’s 2026 estimates, as reported by Quartz, put the du Ponts at $22bn, just ahead of the Hearsts at $21.8bn, with the Rockefellers well behind on $12.5bn. If you were choosing a family to inherit from, the Hearsts would be the better choice: by Forbes’s 2024 count, their fortune is shared by 67 heirs, compared with about 3,500 for the du Ponts.
Cover photographs: Pach Brothers Studio via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain); Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.
