The Milken Family – $3.7B
The Milkens – more specifically, Michael Milken – are infamously wealthy due to Michael’s role in a really big insider trading scam that rocked Wall Street for many generations. He is mainly seen as an architect of junk bonds, are high-yield and poorly rated bonds that financiers grouped together to dupe investors and creditors into buying them. In the late 1980s, the junk bonds proliferation eventually triggered a great domino effect of defaults. Michael Milken pled guilty to charges and was in prison for two years, but in the last few years, he has made attempts to change his public image for the better by investing his money in cancer research. Actually, Milken also survived prostate cancer.
The Milken Family – $3.7B
The Gores Family – $4B
The Gores family hails from Nazareth, a Christian city in modern-day Israel, and they moved to America in the ‘70s, quickly entering the buyout business. Tom Gores eventually found their flagship company, Platinum Equity, which is based in Beverly Hills but has a global reach. Its specialty is leveraged buyout investments and within its first years, it earned almost $1 billion in revenue coming from many precision buyouts. Today, billionaire entrepreneur Tom Gores operates Platinum Equity and has capitalized on his success in business by buying the NBA team Detroit Pistons.
The Gores Family – $4B