Morgan Housel

Because true to the David Senra idea of super successful people who you would never want to be, that's the sense that you get reading the biography of the Vanderbilt heirs.

The money told them who they could be.

It told them where they could live, who they could marry, who they could socialize with, how they had to dress.

They had no independence over their life at all.

And a lot of them, it was almost like they were characters in a movie.

The movie was called The Vanderbilt Family, and they were just reading from a script on who they could be.

They had no independence on who they could be, and a lot of them were just miserable for it.

And this is now a well-known thing, but one of the first Vanderbilt heirs who didn't get a trust fund when there was no money left over was Anderson Cooper.

And he's talked about this, about how he's kind of the first Vanderbilt heir in 150 years who was allowed to be himself.

Had to figure out who he was, create his own identity, make his own money, be his own person.

And it was almost like he was the first person who was like relieved of the burden of the money controlling who they were.

Or just dictating who I was.

He also had another element, which is that his last name is not Vanderbilt.

His mother was Gloria Vanderbilt and his father was a guy named Wyatt Cooper.

And so he didn't have the name recognition of it that would follow him around for the rest of his life and change people's opinion of him.

The Vanderbilts?

Yeah.

A lot of it was mansions and parties and yachts and just the most ostentatious lifestyle that you can imagine.

A lot of it was some of the mansions that they made.

This gets back to the point of what people actually want is like a smaller house.