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 start.”
The silence is deafening
UBS’ numbers tell a story of avoidance masquerading as privacy. While roughly 80% of next-generation heirs say they feel meaningfully informed about the family’s finances (48% say they understand all aspects, while 30% report strong knowledge of specific areas), far fewer say they understand the purpose behind those assets. They know the numbers. They don’t know the why.
“The tax and technical side was always well covered,” one next-generation CEO of a family business told researchers. “But the human side — communication, personal ambitions and preferences — was much less clear.”
That disconnect tracks across generations. Nearly half of all surveyed heirs say the previous generation conducted no structured wealth transfer at all — leaving successors to inherit not just assets, but ambiguity. “There was no strategy or vision,” said one heir. “So when my time comes, I want to have a transparent structure and a common vision of where we want to be.”
They feel it before anyone speaks
This isn’t to say that the next generation needs to be told there’s money. They feel the weight of it long before a word is spoken.
“You feel a sense of responsibility from a very young age,” one heir told researchers. “Even when parents never talk about the wealth, you feel it.”
A total of 56% of next-generation members believe conversations about family wealth should begin in childhood or adolescence — ages zero to 19 — yet the majority say their first real wealth discussion didn’t happen until early adulthood. Families who start earlier, the data shows, experience materially smoother transitions of both responsibility and assets.
The calculus isn’t complicated. Early conversations reduce anxiety; they don’t accelerate burden. “My dad started early by simply taking us along to business visits and making us a part of his conversations with partners and investors,” one heir explained. “So when the actual topic of wealth transfer came later, it already felt normal.”
Where tension lives
When friction does emerge in ultra-wealthy families, UBS found that it rarely starts with a bad investment. It starts with a misread expectation. According to the report, communication breakdowns are the single most common source of conflict — cited by 33% of respondents — ahead of disagreements over spending habits (27%) or fairness (24%), although another 16% chalk it up to lack of clarity over roles, arguably another communication issue.
The pattern is grimly familiar: families avoid discussing death, succession, and expectations until a health crisis or business milestone forces the issue. “Discussing death is an emotional topic,” said one next-generation business leader. “To continue the legacy, you need to talk about it now, not later.”
When silence becomes the default long enough, someone eventually has to schedule a meeting to break it. The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2025 on a rising phenomenon among the ultra-wealthy that recalls something out of organized crime: the formal “trust reveal.” This is a staged, often advisor-led meeting in which heirs are ceremonially informed of their inheritance for the first time. The very existence of the trust reveals something about how far the avoidance has gone: families so uncommunicative about wealth that the inheritance conversation has been outsourced, formalized, and calendared like a board meeting.
Compounding the problem is a structural issue. Fewer than one in four ultrawealthy families have formal governance in place — written constitutions, defined family roles, or documented communication protocols. The rest are improvising. “Before we started to work on this systematically, I had big fights with my father when discussing wealth,” recalled one next-gen family officer. “You can’t underestimate the fights. It ruins families.”
Separate research also strongly suggests that this communication is deadly for fortune longevity. According to a CEOWORLD analysis of wealth transfer patterns, family miscommunication and internal conflict — not market forces — are the leading cause of generational wealth loss. It’s the basis of the old proverb that wealth moves from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” — and the data consistently bears it out: around 70% of family wealth dissipates by the second generation, and roughly 90% by the third.
Heirs are done waiting
What’s changed — and what the UBS report makes clear — is that the next generation is no longer content to be passive recipients. They are, increasingly, initiating the process themselves.
In families where the wealth transfer is already underway, the share of heirs actively driving the process has nearly doubled — from 13% to 22% — compared to families that haven’t yet started. These aren’t reluctant inheritors hoping for a windfall. They’re prospective stewards asking for a seat at the table.
“My biggest challenge is to convince my father to give my brother and me a chance to prove that we are ready to shape things,” said one fifth-generation family member. Notably, the report finds that in fourth- and fifth-generation families, more than 40% of heirs say expectations existed — but they had a meaningful say in shaping their role. The dynastic script is being rewritten.
The hardest question in any boardroom
The irony is not lost on the advisors who work with these families. Men and women who have built global empires, negotiated billion-dollar deals, and managed thousands of employees often find themselves paralyzed when the audience is their own child.
“The hardest part of wealth transfer is the silence around expectations,” Sarah Salomon, Head of Family Advisory and Philanthropy Services at UBS Americas, writes in the report. “Alignment begins with asking, ‘What do you want your life to be about?’ — not ‘Here’s what you’ll inherit.'”
The data backs her up. Families with strong communication governance are 74% more likely to be actively planning and transferring their wealth than those without it. The mechanism matters less than the habit: regular check-ins, clear agendas, documented decisions. “I recently had an issue with my father,” one heir noted. “But because the process was written down, dealing with it was easy.”
Life is imitating art, as of 2026, with Hearts of Midlothian launching an unlikely bid to win the Scottish Premiership and upset “The Old Firm” of the Glasgow giants, Celtic and Rangers. But what would Roman and Logan Roy say about it if they were real? They probably wouldn’t discuss it at all.
