Book Review: Vanderbilt

The rise and fall of an American Dynasty

Another book review for you this time. I promise to get back to my regularly scheduled tech content but I guess this Substack is for me to get back into the habit of writing down my thoughts to improve my communication (as one TikTok interviewer once told me is standard practice in the company).

Vanderbilt

I am not one to read many biographies but this was an interesting one I came across when I was strolling around the library one day. This was a family that I had some idea about from watching The Men Who Built America on the History Channel a few years back. There were also a few TikToks on my very business focussed feed about how this family lost its wealth while the Rockefeller Waterfall method helped that family retain their wealth.

As a young adult that is making his foray into the working world, it is definitely aspirational to be able to amass such wealth (or even a fraction of it). But at the same time, as difficult as it is to earn money, it is even more difficult to keep a hold onto it. Lifestyle inflation is a common byproduct of an increase in wealth.

In some way, I do have a personal connection to the story of the Vanderbilts as my own family was a textile merchant family in Singapore in the late 1800s. From the stories that I have heard being passed down as a word of mouth, my great-great grandfather was one of 3 brothers that established a multinational textile company spanning 5 countries from Surat, India to Tokyo, Japan - Singapore included.

Stories of rows of shophouses in Singapore’s Arab Street and Race Course Road were common as well as those of the ladies of the house having intricate jewellery and weekly tea sessions as part of the society’s events. But what stands to show for all of that? Stories. The waning memory of the last generation that experienced it all as well as a plot of land in our hometown of Surat with busts of the 3 brothers. Stories about parts of the family that held onto the wealth and parts of the family that lost it all in a dramatic fashion.

It is said that the first generation is the one that builds the wealth, the second is the one that maintains it while the third is the one that squanders it because they have not seen the work that went in to build it. In this review, we shall see the story of a family that had it documented in a better fashion than my family did due to the amount of wealth they had, the lifestyle that they got themselves into as well as the unfortunate endings that they all came to.

Summary

This book follows a few generations of Vanderbilts through their lives starting from Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt himself all the way down to the author Anderson Cooper’s own mother, one of the last few Vanderbilts with some sort of trust fund money. The book does not focus so much on the way the Commodore built up his wealth as much as it focusses on the social aspect of the family.