{"id":38653,"date":"2025-11-15T14:12:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T14:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/jeff-bezos-dad-hired-a-ceo-to-run-his-fortune-heres-why-the-superrich-are-poaching-wall-street-bankers-to-manage-theirs\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T14:12:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T14:12:03","slug":"jeff-bezos-dad-hired-a-ceo-to-run-his-fortune-heres-why-the-superrich-are-poaching-wall-street-bankers-to-manage-theirs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/jeff-bezos-dad-hired-a-ceo-to-run-his-fortune-heres-why-the-superrich-are-poaching-wall-street-bankers-to-manage-theirs\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Bezos&#8217; dad hired a CEO to run his fortune. Here&#8217;s why the superrich are poaching Wall Street bankers to manage theirs."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6913284e62a04500b3162259?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Michael Kosnitzky\"\/><figcaption>Michael Kosnitzky.<\/p>\n<p>Courtesy of Michael Kosnitzky<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Jeff Bezos&#039; father hired a CEO to run his fortune \u2014 a move now common among the ultra-rich.<\/li>\n<li>Half of family offices now have non-family CEOs running their private wealth, according to JPMorgan.<\/li>\n<li>The world&#039;s richest families are poaching Wall Street bankers to manage their growing fortunes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When Jeff Bezos&#039; father quietly hired a chief executive to manage his fortune in September, the move made headlines.<\/p>\n<p>Mike Bezos tapped Valeria Alberola \u2014 a former executive for Walmart heir Ben Walton \u2014 to lead his Miami-based family office, Aurora Borealis Nezos.<\/p>\n<p>The hire is part of a major expansion to manage an estimated $40 billion fortune and support multiple generations of the Bezos family, The Wall Street Journal reported.<\/p>\n<p>But to those inside the rarefied world of family offices, the move was anything but surprising.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;This has been going on for years,&quot; Michael Kosnitzky, co-leader of Pillsbury&#039;s Private Client &amp; Family Office practice, who advises some of the world&#039;s wealthiest families, told Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Everyone&#039;s making a big deal of it now, but we&#039;ve been parachuted into these situations for a long time,&quot; he said, not just to help hire these people, but to design the executive comp programs that keep them.<\/p>\n<p>Bezos&#039; father isn&#039;t an outlier.<\/p>\n<p>Across the globe, the ultra-rich are turning their family offices \u2014 once discreet administrative hubs for accountants and lawyers \u2014 into sophisticated investment engines.<\/p>\n<p>And they&#039;re hiring seasoned financiers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and private equity firms to run them.<\/p>\n<h2>The family office goes corporate<\/h2>\n<p>Family offices \u2014 the private firms that manage a family&#039;s investments, philanthropy, and legacy \u2014 used to be sleepy operations run by tax lawyers and estate planners.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;When I started, family offices were run by retired estate lawyers,&quot; said Kosnitzky, who has focused on family offices for more than 20 years. &quot;That was ridiculous \u2014 lawyers aren&#039;t businesspeople, and trusts-and-estates lawyers are the worst.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They thought what a family office needs is someone who knows about wealth. It&#039;s not,&quot; he added.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;What they need are people who understand investments, who can manage platform and club investing, and manage the personnel. These are not lawyers.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Now, many family offices look more like boutique hedge funds or private-equity firms.<\/p>\n<p>They make direct investments, co-invest with other families, and set up their own venture and real-estate vehicles.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They&#039;re snapping up investment bankers and fund managers,&quot; Kosnitzky said. &quot;They want to be compensated like fund managers.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>The data backs him up.<\/p>\n<p>According to JPMorgan&#039;s 2024 Global Family Office Report, 50% of family offices globally have non-family members serving as CEOs or presidents, while that figure rises to 63% among family offices managing $1 billion or more in assets.<\/p>\n<p>The report describes this shift as part of a &quot;broader professionalization&quot; sweeping through the sector.<\/p>\n<h2>The new reasons for hiring outsiders<\/h2>\n<p>Kosnitzky said the shift reflects a fundamental change in how the rich think about risk.<\/p>\n<p>He identified three forces accelerating the trend.<\/p>\n<p>First, a wave of liquidity events \u2014 from IPOs to business sales \u2014 has flooded ultrawealthy families with cash to manage.<\/p>\n<p>Second, a younger generation of billionaires, often self-made and tech-savvy, prefers to invest directly rather than hand their money to banks.<\/p>\n<p>And third, many families are teaming up to invest in startups and private ventures \u2014 a model known as &quot;club investing.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They don&#039;t want to pay the carried interest to some third party,&quot; Kosnitzky said. &quot;They don&#039;t want to deal with conflicts of interest. They say, &#039;I can do this myself.&#039;&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, 73% of family offices say they have now implemented formal governance structures, such as boards of directors or investment committees, to manage their growing complexity, according to JPMorgan&#039;s report.<\/p>\n<h2>Why CEOs from Wall Street fit the job<\/h2>\n<p>Running a family office, however, requires more than financial savvy.<\/p>\n<p>It&#039;s part CEO, part advisor, and part therapist. The job often blends asset management with philanthropy, art curation, and navigating intergenerational politics.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You might have a 50-year personal assistant who isn&#039;t the most efficient person, certainly not technologically, but they&#039;re trusted and hold all the family secrets,&quot; Kosnitzky said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You can&#039;t just fire her and bring in your own people,&quot; he added. &quot;You have to play the cards you&#039;ve been dealt. It&#039;s more personalized, more touchy-feely stuff.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>That makes family office leadership one of the most complex roles in the finance industry.<\/p>\n<p>Successful CEOs must strike a balance between hard-nosed investment judgment and emotional intelligence.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You&#039;re not running a business in the traditional sense,&quot; Kosnitzky said. &quot;You&#039;re running a family. The right person understands that money isn&#039;t the only metric \u2014 legacy, art, philanthropy, and continuity matter just as much.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>Billionaires want control \u2014 and value<\/h2>\n<p>The ultra-rich, Kosnitzky said, are professionalizing their empires \u2014 but on their own terms. They want institutional discipline without the red tape.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It&#039;s not new to us,&quot; he said. &quot;The trend&#039;s been there probably at least three years, maybe five. What&#039;s new is how you compensate those people and how you align their interests.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>JPMorgan&#039;s report shows that most family offices remain deliberately lean, with 82% havingjust one to three senior executives, often &quot;expert generalists&quot; who can juggle investment oversight, succession planning, and governance.<\/p>\n<p>For many on Wall Street, joining a family office means trading quarterly pressure for long-term influence \u2014 and, in many cases, a slice of the upside.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They&#039;re being compensated with a piece of the action,&quot; Kosnitzky said.<\/p>\n<p>And that, for the best and brightest in finance, might be the ultimate promotion.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Kosnitzky. Courtesy of Michael Kosnitzky Jeff Bezos&#039; father hired a CEO to run his fortune \u2014 a move now common among the ultra-rich. Half of family offices now have non-family CEOs running their private wealth, according to JPMorgan. The world&#039;s richest families are poaching Wall Street bankers to manage their growing fortunes. When Jeff [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}