The S.C. Johnson Family – $28.2B
The founding family of famous household goods manufacturer, S.C. Johnson, is next on our list. It is a little-known fact that the S.C. Johnson business, founded in 1886, was originally intended to be a parquet flooring retailer. After formulating a popular brand of floor wax, business began booming and a new empire was born. Far from its small beginnings, the company now creates a wide array of household-name cleaning products (such as Glade and Pledge), as well as other much loved and relied on products like Ziploc bags. Behind this wholesome family brand also lurks a tumultuous history of rabid infighting and family legal drama, the most recent of which began when Herbert Johnson – the family patriarch – died without a will, leaving his heirs to fight tooth and nail over the rights to his great dynasty.
The Johnson Family
The Hastings Family – $2.2B
Being the better-recognized leader within the Hastings group, Reed Hastings is famous for revolutionizing home entertainment by forming Netflix. The software business Adaptive provided the foundation for his genius with his primary technology position, where he developed software for cleaning bugs from programs. He later established Rational Software and Pure Software, then cleverly buying out just before their worth plummeted. When Hastings created Netflix towards the end of the millennium, it was initially an online service solely for renting films, being relatively popular. That being said, it was with the rise of online television streaming that Netflix capitalized on this service and rose to omnipresent levels.
The Hastings Family
