175 Years Later, The Mellons Have Never Been Richer. How'd They Do It?

Meet the Mellons: Nicole, Olympia, 1, Force, 3, and Matthew, at home in New York's Pierre Hotel (Photo: Jamel Toppin for FORBES)

By Abram Brown and Alex Morrell

At first blush Matthew Taylor Mellon II lives up to his patrician name as we dine at his favorite lunch spot, a little Italian place below his apartment situated within Manhattan’s stately Pierre hotel. Five years sober, after lengthy battles with drugs and booze, the 50-year-old has an enviable tan that complements his blue Savile Row suit and Hermés tie. He orders a salad and a cranberry-juice-and-soda.

But unexpectedly he asks the waiter to take away his cellphones, fearing Snowden-style eavesdropping. And then the scion of America’s most enduring banking family lets it fly: “I feel like citizens are fed up with banksters,” using a term the Occupy Wall Street crowd would surely approve. Politicians receive similar disdain: “We need to live in a more transparent, free democracy. The more secretive America becomes, the more dangerous it is.” The solution, Mellon says, is Bitcoin, and he’s invested $2 million to start an incubator for Bitcoin companies, convinced virtual currency will replace the dollar bill. “The banks are going to be scratching their heads,” he says, a smile encroaching on his high cheekbones.

A bit loony? Clearly. But in an ironic way, Matthew Mellon is exactly what his great-great-great-grandfather Thomas Mellon envisioned when he launched the family on what’s now a nearly two-century run of financial dominance. In scanning FORBES’ first-ever ranking of America’s Richest Families, one thing that stands out is how many of the great fortunes of the mid-19th century have dissipated. The Astors and the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and the Carnegies, none make the cut. Some of that is the result of generous, world-changing philanthropy. Some of it decades upon decades of wastrel heirs. Much stems from both. Amid this peer group, however, the Mellons stand out. Of America’s billion-dollar dynasties, only the Du Ponts are having a longer run, and they have a dominant family company perpetually generating the wealth. Not so with the Mellons, who have flaky heirs like Matthew plowing millions into fashion labels and Bitcoin startups, yet have nonetheless maintained a $12 billion fortune, the 19th-largest family net worth in America, one greater than the Rockefellers and Kennedys, combined.

Thomas Mellon

They’ve done this quietly. Most of the Mellons contacted declined to be interviewed for this story or would speak only on background “We’re happy being under the radar,” says Peter Stephaich, Matthew’s cousin, who owns a barge company in Pittsburgh. But the secret boils down to a family ethos that values one thing over all others: capital preservation. While the pitfalls of inheriting money without purpose have been well documented, Thomas Mellon himself put forward a tacit understanding that while spending was acceptable (Matthew Mellon’s pad at the Pierre is likely worth $7 million, and he likes to fly private), it came with the expectation that each generation push forward a bigger pile than he or she was given. While all the branches operate independently, they’ve almost universally employed smart tricks that minimize taxes, including generation-skipping trusts and making charitable contributions in stock. More critically, Thomas Mellon expected his progeny to be entrepreneurial, with the anticipated corollary that the process would fuel the American economic machine.

Other than that, there have been few covenants or restrictions, with nary a family office or annual meeting. The family mantra as he was growing up, Matthew Mellon recalls: “Intuition is the number one tool in the toolbox.” The result of all that decentralized intuition has been numerous companies, from banking to media to metals to energy, that have altered the face of American business.

The last time the do-it-yourself Mellon clan actually got together, a once-a-decade occurrence that happened four years ago, they went back to the roots of their success: a patch of land in County Tyrone, Ireland. It was here that Thomas Mellon was born to farmers in 1813. The family immigrated to America in 1818, settling into a dilapidated log cabin near relatives who arrived before them in a section of western Pennsylvania that would soon be proven a misnomer, Poverty Point.

His parents soon made their 160-acre lot prosperous. Thomas worked the ground alongside them, but when the plow horses needed a rest, he read Shakespeare in the shade. “The more I read and the more I saw, I was the more convinced that I might do better,” Thomas wrote in his autobiography.

He moved to Pittsburgh, studied law and married Sarah Jane Negley, in 1843–mother to a son, Andrew, and seven other children. He became a judge–forever after known simply as the Judge–and used his income to invest in real estate. He eventually used the returns from foreclosed properties and coal land to start a bank, T. Mellon & Sons. It opened in December 1869 with $10,000 in initial deposits, according to Mellon: An American Life by Princeton professor David  Cannadine. Within three years he had $800,000. That little bank has grown into a cornerstone of what today is the $1.6 trillion (assets) BNY Mellon.

Later in life the Judge focused on what would become of his financial efforts. He disliked his contemporary Andrew Carnegie’s massive philanthropic efforts (though his son would give generously, eventually helping establish the National Gallery of Art), and instead split up his estate among his sons with the expectation that they grow the pile.

Just as Thomas had broken from the farming future his parents had in mind, Andrew, the family’s true empire builder, forged his own path: He became a turn-of-the-century venture capitalist. In 1889 Andrew made a $25,000 loan to the Pittsburgh Reduction Co., an aluminum manufacturer, and subsequently purchased equity in the company. Profits rose from $87,000 in 1898 to $322,000 in 1900–then quickly crested the million-dollar mark. The company today is known as Alcoa.

Andrew Mellon

A decade later he put $1 million into creating Union Steel. He sold it four years later to J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel, likely making at least $41 million on its sale. (He was later accused by the U.S. government of inflating assets on Union’s balance sheet.)

He also invested in the next generation: Andrew’s nephew William Larimer Mellon was as eager to prove himself as his uncle and grandfather had been. Seeded with $10,000 from the family coffers, he chased the Rockefellers into the oil business. That company wound up being Gulf Oil. Nearly a hundred years later Gulf Oil was sold to Chevron in 1984 for $13.3 billion; the Mellons appear to have held on to their shares after the sale, and their fortune was little changed at an estimated $2.5 billion.

Andrew served as U.S. Treasury Secretary under three presidents from 1921-32–credited for the Roaring ’20s, then blamed for the Great Depression.

When he died in 1937 he had amassed a fortune exceeding $280 million, more than $4 billion in today’s dollars, up from $50 million at the turn of the century–wealth created in ways his father had never considered. Today the idea of the Mellons as a “banking” fortune is, to the family members, an ancient notion. “Those who did own large positions in the bank’s stock have found better things to do with their money,” says Matthew’s uncle, James. “Some of us still benefit from trusts in the bank, but that’s the only relationship that we have to the institution nowadays. Frankly, banking has been a dud business for a long time.”

While the modern Mellons haven’t had grand slams along the lines of Alcoa, Gulf Oil or the eponymous family bank, they’ve followed through on the Judge’s request that they invest and diversify. Thomas Mellon Evans amassed a $290 million fortune and died in 1997 with a menacing epithet: “the Jaws of Business.” He started in the Gulf Oil stats department in 1931 and became one of the earliest takeover artists, buying more than 80 companies with a foolproof formula: He’d never pay more than their breakup value.

Skipping another generation ahead, Timothy Mellon started off creating a computer-programming company in the 1960s, then expanded into industries more typical of the late 19th century, building a New England railroad company, Guilford. Today he’s personally worth almost $1 billion.

Then there was Richard Mellon Scaife*. Scaife  bought a small suburban paper in 1970, then grew it into today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Best known as the man who reportedly funded an ongoing effort to dig up dirt on Bill Clinton during the 1990s, Scaife is perhaps the most important media mogul in western Pennsylvania, with several local weekly newspapers and a stake in Newsmax, the conservative online newsmagazine. He was worth $1.5 billion when he died earlier this month from cancer.

Which brings us to Matthew Mellon, who is carrying on the family tradition of investing in far-flung personal business passions. Matthew’s father, Karl Mellon, was an absent parent for most of his childhood and later committed suicide, a subject he isn’t fond of bringing up. His mother, Anne, and stepfather, J. Reeve Bright, a once powerful GOP attorney and distant relative of Theodore Roosevelt, largely kept him in the dark about the Mellons and what he could expect in terms of inheritance.

Matthew and Nicole Mellon

So it came as a shock at age 21 when he inherited 14 trust funds worth an estimated $25 million. “There’s a saying: more money, more problems,” says Matthew. With little grounding in how to live up to the Mellon name or what to do with the money, he raced around southern California in a little black Ferrari, working ostensibly as a talent agent. He swam the bay at St. Tropez with the crown prince of Greece. (“He’s a really fun guy,” says Prince Pavlos.) He partied, enjoying scotch on the rocks and developing an addiction to cocaine.

Entrepreneurship found him at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in 1998, when he met Tamara Yeardye, who was building the shoe line Jimmy Choo. They married, and the Mellon genes soon had him dabbling, first with a Jimmy Choo men’s line, then his own shoe brand, Harrys of London, with shoes cushioned like a sneaker and fancy like a wingtip.

Harrys got some traction, but it proved a decade ahead of its time. “I think if it launched today it would be much bigger and have a more global appetite,” says Michael Atmore, editor of Footwear News . And recurring addiction–one investment was negotiated from a rehab pay phone–stunted sales, which today remain at $7 million. (He lost day-to-day management in 2005, and his marriage to Yeardye ended shortly thereafter.)

Still, the Mellon lessons had seeped in. (“You never touch the principal. And you try to spend 1% of your income that comes in. There are always surprises. Always emergencies. Always charities. Trust me, you end up spending 20% of your income.”) And as he got sober, he began investing: in an online art action house, Paddle8, alongside Alex von Furstenberg and Damien Hirst, and a YouTube channel called StyleHaul, which produces short movies on how to dress well.

And given his fashion chops (besides Jimmy Choo and Harrys, he dated Tory Burch in college), he’s at it again. With his new wife, Nicole Hanley, a former Ralph Lauren designer, he has started Hanley Mellon, with an e-commerce store selling chic women’s clothing, with $3 million invested in the past year or so.

Working from a living room adorned with two Warhols, Nicole is calling the shots on the fashion business, while Matthew focuses on the Bitcoin incubator, CoinApex, which plays into his antiestablishment worldview (he also once contributed to Julian Assange’s bail money).

For now it’s all pie in the sky, though Matthew insists he received a buyout offer in the ballpark of $20 million for the most promising one, Coin.co, a payment processor of Bitcoins the way PayPal handles a transaction between sellers and buyers in dollars. “Matthew is the kind of guy who’s very smart about attracting very talented people to help him figure it out,” says J. Todd Morley, founder of Guggenheim Partners and a longtime friend. “I know he’s been studying Bitcoin and talking to senior people in the industry.”

Already, though, there’s a shift in the way Matthew is perceived as a Mellon. His aunt, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, died this spring. He went to Virginia for the funeral, one of the few events that can bring the Mellons together. At one point he struck up a conversation with one of Bunny’s advisors. “He said, ‘I can tell you that you’re on to something really huge. You could be the next Andrew Mellon in that space,’ ” Matthew recalls. “ Which I took as a huge compliment.”

Reach Abram Brown at abrown@forbes.com and Alex Morrell at amorrell@forbes.com.

* After this story was published in Forbes magazine, Richard Mellon Scaife died on July 4.