Billionaires have a problem money can’t solve: They don’t know how to talk to their kids

The scene lasts about 30 seconds but communicates a lifetime of ultrawealthy dysfunction. Roman Roy, desperate to impress his aging father, announces with pride that he’s bought Hearts of Midlothian, one of Edinburgh’s two great football clubs, for his father, the swaggering Scottish-born media billionaire Logan Roy. The other Edinburgh club, though, also starts with an “H.” Its name is Hibernian FC, or “Hibs,” for short. Logan stares back at Roman. “I’m Hibs.” The implication is that Logan and his son know so little about each other and have so much money to spend that Roman essentially doesn’t know whether his father supports the Mets or the Yankees. It’s one of the most devastating jokes in the long run of the HBO smash Succession, not because Roman bought the wrong football club, but because it reveals, in a single exchange, how communication does — or doesn’t — work for ultrawealthy families. Over the next two to three decades, an estimated $83 trillion in private wealth will change hands in what analysts are calling the largest wealth transfer in modern history. There’s just a little problem: ahead of the Great Wealth Transfer, parents and their heirs are barely talking. That’s the (arguably) striking finding buried inside UBS’s new Global Next Generation Report 2026, which surveyed more than 170 members of the inheriting class — the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the world’s ultrawealthy. The conclusion: the greatest threat to a smooth generational handoff isn’t a market downturn or an estate-planning error. It’s awkwardness. “There’s a willingness to talk about the family wealth,” one anonymous next-generation family member who’s not currently involved in managing their family fortune told UBS researchers, “but the conversations never quite happen. I think we’re all waiting for the other side to