Is The Rothschild Family The Richest In The World? - YouTube

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.