Victor Haghani: Missing Billionaires w/ ex-LTCM partner & Elm Wealth Founder

**Bogumil Baranowski** (0:00)
I want to talk to you about The Missing Billionaires and your book. The reason I'm especially curious about it is that I've worked with families that had fortunes for many generations, and I wrote a book Money Life Family where I studied stories of families around the world that managed to keep their wealth over multiple generations. And it's more of an exception than a rule. And you make a fascinating point, and I'll let you share the story, how looking at the number of millionaires that we had in the US a hundred years ago, we should have a lot more billionaires with inherited wealth among us today, but we don't.
What happened?

**Victor Haghani** (0:37)
You know, we don't really know what happened. So that's right. I mean, you laid it out very succinctly there that, you know, looking at census data from 1900, you know, there were 4,000 millionaires. There were probably a thousand of them that had four or five million dollars or more.
There should be thousands of billionaires today that are descended from those families from 1900 But when we looked on the Forbes billionaire list, we struggled to find even one that ties back there. But, you know, over 30 or 40 years, too much risk with the poor, the newly chosen spending policy will really deplete wealth.

**Bogumil Baranowski** (1:26)
Welcome to Talking Billions. We talk about big ideas, big inspirations, big topics. We take on the hardest subject of all, money. How to make it, save it, keep it. But our conversations lead us to an even bigger question, what it means to live a rich life beyond money. My guests share their practices, principles, and evergreen wisdom. I'm your host, Bogumil Baranowski, author, TEDx speaker, investor, and a founding partner of Sikard Associates, a boutique investment firm founded in New York City. Join me on this quest to unearth the wisdom of the ages.
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My guest today is Victor Haghani. He started his career in 1984 at Salomon Brothers, where he became a managing director in the bond arbitrage group run by John Meriwether.
Victor was a co-founding partner of LTCM, Long Term Capital Management. In 2011, Victor founded Elm Wealth to help clients, including his own family, manage and preserve their wealth with a thoughtful, research-based and cost-effective approach that covers not just investment management, but also broader decisions about wealth and finances.
In his TEDx talk, Where Are All the Billionaires and Why We Should Care, Victor shares his unique perspective on active versus passive investing.
Victor has been a prolific contributor to the academic and practitioner finance literature. He is a co-author of the book The Missing Billionaires, A Guide to Better Financial Decisions, which has just been released and is available on Amazon and with most other booksellers.