The NewYorker
By Evan Osnos
January 16th, 2023
Heirs to an iconic fortune sought out a wealth manager who would assuage their progressive consciences. Now their dispute is exposing dynastic secrets…
For the very rich, private wealth managers are in a separate class from other retainers, even from the trusted pilots, chefs, and attendants who maintain their life styles. Guarding the capital—the “corpus,” as it’s known in the business—puts you in contact with a family’s most closely held secrets. Managers handle delicate tasks; one professional in the Cayman Islands described the sensitivity of making a financial plan for an out-of-wedlock child that “has to be kept totally private from the wife.” Others specialize in keeping clients out of the news by minimizing public transactions. The most devoted liken themselves to clergy or consiglieri, and tend to get prime seats at the kids’ weddings and the patriarch’s deathbed.
Marlena Sonn entered the wealth-management industry in 2010, and found a niche working with what she called “progressive, ultra-high-net-worth millennials, women, inheritors, and family offices.” She sought to create a refuge from jargon and bro culture. “Women and young people are talked down to,” she told me. “A level of respect for people is refreshing.”
Sonn didn’t come from money. She was born in Queens, to parents from South Korea, who she says were determined to see her “fulfill the American Dream—go to Ivy League schools and become a doctor or a lawyer.” As a student at Barnard College, she was drawn to the punk and goth scenes and to progressive politics. After school, she moved to San Francisco, campaigned for a higher minimum wage, and planned on a career in activism. But in 2005, while working at a nonprofit, she developed an unexpected fascination with her retirement account. She took to listening to analyst calls with C.E.O.s, buying stocks on E-Trade, and watching exultantly as some of her picks spiked in value. Within a few years, she had left the nonprofit world for finance. “That was where the real levers of power were,” she said, adding, “My parents were so relieved.”
“My career in finance is over,” Sonn said. I asked what her parents made of that. She gave a wan laugh and said, “I fulfilled a lot of their intergenerational ambitions.” She had reached the heights of wealth management, optimized her position, and sued in pursuit of millions. Viewed from a certain angle, it was a capitalist fairy tale. When the Pleiades Trust opens, each of the sisters can expect to receive at least $300 million, minus whatever taxes their office does not succeed in avoiding. Sonn, whether or not she obtains the rest of her payout, will have made millions of dollars from her association with the Gettys. One wealth manager told me that it would have been unusual for Sonn to spend eight years as “a slave to these prima-donna girls, without the expectation that there’s something at the end of the rainbow.”
Sonn said she had come to believe that, unless wealthy Americans made some sacrifices to undo the stagnation of social mobility, stories like hers would become impossible: “My parents came here imagining that they could build a better life, and I am a product of that. And I think that some of what we’re experiencing is that window has been closing for the last ten or twenty years.”
