Imagine two great fortunes. One has been passed down from parents to children for four or five generations. The other did not even exist when its founder started working. Both may be worth billions, but they represent two different ways of understanding wealth.

For centuries, Europe has accumulated large family fortunes. The United States, while by no means free of dynasties, has built much of its economic narrative around the entrepreneur who creates a fortune. Is the difference cultural, or is it the economic systems themselves that teach us whether to preserve or to take risks?

Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI and one of the most representative figures of the new American economy, has reflected on this issue. In a text published in 2017, entitled “American Equity”, he warned that countries that concentrate wealth in a small number of families tend to perform worse over the long term. His proposal went far beyond entrepreneurship and advocated a better distribution of the benefits of growth, but it raised an interesting question: what happens when wealth stops circulating and remains concentrated for generations?

The question, therefore, is not whether Americans are entrepreneurs and Europeans are heirs. There are both on either side of the Atlantic. The interesting question is another one: why has the United States been much more efficient over the past few decades at turning ideas, businesses and risk into new great fortunes?

When european wealth had land, a surname and heirs

To understand this difference, we have to go back long before Silicon Valley. For centuries, in Europe, being wealthy meant above all owning land. Land generated income, food and political power. Great aristocratic families protected their wealth through inheritance, marriages and legal mechanisms designed to prevent its fragmentation. The main objective was not to multiply it by taking great risks, but to preserve it so that it could be passed on to the next generation.

The Industrial Revolution began to break this model. Factories challenged land’s role as the great generator of wealth, and a new business class emerged. But many of those industrial fortunes also became family fortunes over time. Even today, we can observe this continuity in some of Europe’s best-known companies. The Quandt family continues to play a decisive role behind BMW; Hermès maintains strong ties with the founder’s descendants; and a significant part of L’Oréal remains associated with the Bettencourt Meyers family.

This does not mean that these are stagnant companies. Many have innovated, grown and created thousands of jobs. But they exemplify a characteristic of European wealth: a significant part of large-scale capital has had time to become multigenerational capital.

And today this transfer continues to accelerate. According to UBS’s Billionaire Ambitions Report 2025, in that year alone 91 heirs received $297.8 billion, the highest figure recorded by the report. Western Europe was at the epicentre: 48 heirs received $149.5 billion, more than double the $86.5 billion inherited in North America. On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, a different narrative had been taking shape.

From Carnegie to Jobs: the invention of the self-made man

Andrew Carnegie arrived in the United States from Scotland as a child and would go on to build one of the great steel empires of the 19th century. Henry Ford, the son of a Michigan farming family, transformed automobile manufacturing. A century later, Steve Jobs co-founded Apple and Jeff Bezos turned an online bookstore called Amazon into one of the largest companies on the planet.

Their stories are very different, and it would be naive to claim that all great American entrepreneurs literally started from nothing. Education, contacts, access to credit or a family capable of absorbing the risk of failure are also forms of capital. But these names helped fuel an idea deeply rooted in the American imagination: a fortune is not only received; it can also be built.

First came the railways, steel and oil. Then the automobile and mass consumption. Later came computers, the Internet and digital platforms. Every major American technological revolution has created a new generation of companies and, with them, new fortunes. The scale of the phenomenon is difficult to ignore. UBS estimates that 74% of the 924 billionaires in the United States in 2025 had created their own fortunes.

Mario Draghi summed up the difference with Europe with an even more striking figure. When he presented his report on European competitiveness, he pointed out that no EU company created from scratch over the previous fifty years had exceeded €100 billion in market capitalisation, while in the United States six companies created during the same period had exceeded €1 trillion. It is not that Europe has stopped producing entrepreneurs. The problem seems to arise when they try to turn a good company into a global giant.

From Zara to Spotify: Europe also knows how to create fortunes

Amancio Ortega is probably the best counterexample to any caricature of a Europe dominated by heirs. He began his textile business in 1963, created Confecciones Goa in 1972 and founded Zara three years later. That business would eventually become Inditex, one of the world’s largest textile groups. And it is not an isolated case.

Daniel Ek’s name may not be as well known as Mark Zuckerberg’s, but almost everyone knows the company he founded: Spotify. Ek had already created a digital advertising company before founding Spotify in 2006 together with Martin Lorentzon.

Here we have an interesting comparison. Spotify and Facebook were founded only two years apart. Daniel Ek and Mark Zuckerberg belong practically to the same generation, and both created digital products capable of reaching hundreds of millions of people. But Facebook would eventually become Meta and one of the world’s largest technology corporations. Spotify is an extraordinary European business success, but it operates on a different scale.

We can also look at finance. Nik Storonsky’s name is less well known than Jeff Bezos’s, but millions of Europeans know Revolut, the company he co-founded with Vlad Yatsenko in 2015. Ortega, Ek and Storonsky show that Europe does not have a shortage of entrepreneurs. To understand the difference, we have to look at what happens after a company has been created.

Having an idea is one thing. Turning it into an empire is another

Imagine two entrepreneurs with a promising technology company. One works in Barcelona; the other in San Francisco. Both need five million to get started. Then fifty million. Later, two hundred million. This is when geography starts to matter.

According to the European Central Bank, venture capital funds based in the United States hold approximately €930 billion, compared with around €150 billion in the European Union. In other words, the American market is around six times larger. And the difference is particularly significant at later stages, when a company needs large amounts of capital to make the leap from a promising start-up to a multinational. This changes the game.

A company can be born from a good idea and a handful of engineers. But building factories, entering fifty countries, hiring thousands of employees or competing with multinationals requires capital. This is where one of the fundamental differences between the two models emerges: Europe is capable of creating companies; the United States has built an extraordinarily powerful machine for making them grow. It is not just a question of money. The depth of financial markets, European regulatory fragmentation, the size of the internal market and investors’ capacity to take significant risks also play a role.

Draghi explained it with another revealing figure: between 2008 and 2021, almost 30% of unicorns founded in Europe moved their headquarters abroad, mainly to the United States. The talent had been born here. So had the company. But the capital needed to take the next step was often on the other side of the Atlantic. This forces us to reinterpret the supposed difference in mentality. Perhaps Europe does not have fewer people willing to take risks. Perhaps it has a system that makes it more difficult for them to keep taking risks when the time comes to grow.

When new money becomes old money

But the story has an interesting twist. Any fortune created from scratch can eventually become an inherited fortune. Walmart is probably one of the clearest examples. Sam Walton built the business that would eventually become the global retail giant. Decades after his death, structures linked to the Walton family continue to control a huge part of the company. In 2025, Walmart reported that approximately 45% of its shares were held by entities associated with the founder’s family and that members of three generations of the Walton family had served on the board of directors. It is difficult to find a better metaphor.

One of the great fortunes created by an American entrepreneur has, over time, become an enormous family fortune passed down through generations. The phenomenon will expand much further over the coming years. UBS estimates that today’s American billionaires will transfer around $2.8 trillion to their heirs over the next fifteen years. American capitalism, which for decades has produced new money, is now also creating its own old money. And this is where Europe and the United States meet again.

Mentality or system?

It is tempting to think that Americans are culturally more entrepreneurial and Europeans more conservative. But this explanation is too easy. A society also learns what it means to take risks through its institutions. If there are investors willing to finance an idea even though it may fail, taking risks becomes easier. If a company can quickly access a homogeneous continental market, growth becomes easier. If capital markets can provide hundreds of millions when the time comes to scale up, the entrepreneur does not need to sell the company too early or look for capital elsewhere.

When these conditions do not exist, preserving wealth can be a perfectly rational decision. Perhaps, therefore, mentality does not only create the system. The system also ends up creating the mentality.

This brings us back to Sam Altman’s reflection. He himself has warned that the concentration of wealth in a few hands can become a problem and that automation can intensify this trend if the benefits of growth do not reach society as a whole. Creating fortunes, therefore, is not necessarily synonymous with creating shared prosperity. But an economy that stops generating new companies also runs the risk of becoming increasingly dependent on the fortunes, companies and sectors it created in the past.

The most important fortune is the one that does not yet exist

Europe does not need more billionaires to become a better economy. It needs a good idea to have a genuine chance of becoming a major company in Barcelona, Paris or Berlin without having to move to San Francisco to find the necessary capital.

Amancio Ortega, Daniel Ek and Nik Storonsky show that entrepreneurship is not an American monopoly. The Waltons show, at the same time, that inheritance is not a European monopoly either. That is why the decisive question is not whether a society has many wealthy people. Nor even whether those wealthy people inherited or created their fortunes. The question is another one: when the next great idea appears, will it find the capital to grow, or will it have to leave to find it?

Europe has savings, talent, universities, researchers and entrepreneurs. The challenge is to ensure that this enormous wealth is not used solely to protect the wealth created in the past, but also to finance the wealth that does not yet exist.

Because managing a fortune well is important. But an economy that only preserves eventually ends up living off what previous generations built. And perhaps it is here, more than in any supposed difference in character between Europeans and Americans, that it is decided who will manage the wealth of the past and who will create the wealth of the future.

At La Plaça by 11Onze, we continue to analyse the major economic transformations that explain how wealth is created, preserved and transferred. Because understanding money also means understanding the structures that determine who can take risks, who can grow and who ultimately turns an idea into wealth.

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