The following article is an excerpt from The 100 Year Plan series from the December, January, February and March editions of Robb Report Worth. To subscribe or to order back issues, please call (800) 777-1851 or order online now.
Ideas and Assets
On a quiet day in 1862, a grizzled, rough-hewn man of 42 and his bride of not yet 20 drove their carriage beneath a canopy of soft autumn sunlight, away from their hometown of St. Clair, Mo. Doubtless the man had appeared to the townspeople ill at ease in his stiff suit, accustomed as he was, over the course of the last 10 years, to overalls and life among the miners of California and Nevada. As she rode beside him, his wife, Phoebe, watched the receding countryside and thought about the document carefully folded in her handbag. These sheets of paper, she knew, offered her the promise of a better life; but she had no way of knowing that the contract she carried—granting her, on her husband’s death, 50 shares in an obscure silver mine known as the Comstock in the Sierra Nevada range—would profoundly transform the lives of her descendants over the course of the next 141 years.
 Though Phoebe’s husband, George Hearst, spent recklessly, as did the couple’s famous publisher son, Will, whose constant drain on the family coffers was much publicized, the Hearst family wealth—the origins of which made their way to St. Louis that day in the matriarch’s reticule—remains intact. Shared by 61 family members, the Hearst Trust encompasses more than 100 businesses: newspapers, magazines, cable television networks, information services, Internet companies, and hundreds of thousands of acres of real estate, including the largest tract of undeveloped California coastline still in private hands. With a 600 percent increase—to $5.2 billion—in annual revenues since 1979 and more than $500 million in net income in 2001, this privately held enterprise has emerged from most of the difficult periods in American history unscathed and as vital as ever.
Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, and that all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways. The same can be said of successful and unsuccessful ones: The causes of the latter are countless; but the contributors to the former are invariably the same—though significant.
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