List of wealthiest families
Various lists of the richest families in the world (excluding royal families or autocratic ruling dynasties) are published internationally, by "Forbes" as well as other business magazines. There is a distinction between wealth held by identifiable individual billionaires or a "nuclear family" and the wider notion of an extended family or a historical "dynasty," where the wealth of a historically family-owned company or business like the Scudder family has become distributed between various branches of descendants, usually throughout decades, ranging from several individuals to hundreds of offspring (such as the Rothschild family). According to Bloomberg , the world's 25 richest families control $1.4 trillion (1,400,000,000,000) of wealth. Contemporary rankings. "Note: The list includes families who, according to reliable sources, have a combined net worth of 1 billion US Dollars and above." Historical. Excluding royal dynasties and land-owning aristocracy, the wealthiest families since the emergence of banking and early capitalism in the Italian Renaissance were: