Many of us are more than a little curious about the lives of the rich and famous.
In the mid-1800s, Bernard Stroh came to the U.S. and began selling beer in Detroit.
The business grew and prospered, but around 150 years later, the family company was bought and broken up.
Kerry A. Dolan of Forbes chronicles the rise and fall of the family in her piece, How to blow $9 billion: The fallen Stroh family.
From Dolan's story:
The Stroh family owned it all, a fortune that FORBES then calculated was worth at least $700 million. Just by matching the S&P 500, the family would currently be worth about $9 billion. Yet today the Strohs, as a family business or even a collective financial entity, have ceased to exist. The company has been sold for parts. The trust funds have doled out their last pennies to shareholders. While there was enough cash flowing for enough years that the fifth generation Strohs still seem pretty comfortable, the family looks destined to go shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves in six.
Frances Stroh, a fifth generation family member, is working on a memoir about the family.
h/t Lester Graham
