The Hermès heir Nicolas Puech was once worth $15.6bn by Forbes's count. His lawyers say the shares are no longer his, Forbes dropped him from its list, and he once planned to leave half his fortune to his former gardener.

JUST IN: Warren Buffett's children inherit a deadline, not a fortune. $140 billion to give away by 31 December 2034, every grant by unanimous vote. Their mother left them $10 million each.

Rose Leslie's family is not selling Lickleyhead Castle. A lender sold it in 2019 for £650,000. Late October brought a wave of headlines pricing her "ancestral home" at $1.54m, as if an old family were quietly loosening its grip. The castle is for sale. Almost everything else needs correcting. The Leslies lost it slowly, then in a sheriff court. In September 2018 Together Commercial Finance was granted a decree for repossession at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, having asked for Rose's father, Sebastian Leslie, to be found in default over calling-up notices. He did not attend, and sent an email saying he had no objection. The lender advertised at offers over £700,000. It sold for £650,000 to Mark and Cathy Davies, a couple from Wirral, who made it a luxury holiday let and events venue. That was half what the family had hoped for in 2013, when agents called the castle "surplus to their requirements" and asked about £1.3m. Then there is the wedding. Rose Leslie married Kit Harington on 23 June 2018, with the reception at Wardhill Castle, where her brother William and his wife Sarah took over the estate in 2014. Two castles in one parish is a lot of roof. The one with the wedding photographs is not the one with the estate agent's board. The $1.54m is a calculator's work. Savills prices Lickleyhead in sterling, at offers over £1,150,000, and Mansion Global converted it to "£1.15 million (US$1.54 million)". The figure then travelled with a famous name attached and the ownership history left behind. For that, a buyer gets an L-shaped tower house in Premnay, listed Grade A, with eight bedrooms, 5,554 sq ft, about 11 acres, a walled garden and a former ice house. Nobody agrees on its age: 1499, 1560, 1580, or simply 17th century, depending on who you ask. The ask is about 77 per cent above the 2019 price, and still roughly £150,000 below what the Leslies wanted thirteen years ago. Families measure castles in centuries; lenders measure them in calling-up notices.

Standard Oil paid King Ibn Saud $1,156,400 for the right to look for oil in his kingdom. By 1950 his half of the profits was $90 million a year. Time reported the first figure in 1940: the payment when he granted the concession, and $165,000 a year in rent until oil was found. He told the oilmen the Japanese had offered him twice as much for a third of the ground. By 1941 he was in trouble. His ordinary revenue, from the pilgrimage to Mecca and from customs, had practically disappeared. An oil company told President Roosevelt his finances were desperate; it had spent about $27.5 million and advanced him $6.8 million against royalties. Watch the Universal Newsreel of 21 February 1945: rugs spread on an American warship's deck, his guards, and then the King beside Roosevelt. The two met aboard the USS Quincy on 14 February. In 1946 he was paid 22 cents a barrel. Oil and the pilgrimage were his chief sources of income. At the end of 1950 Aramco made him an equal partner in its profits. Time put his take for 1950 at $90 million, against $60 million under the old royalty of 34 cents a barrel. $1,156,400 to let them look. $90 million a year once they found it.

Warren Buffett's daughter Susie asked him for a $41,000 loan for a kitchen. He told her to go to the bank. The children got $10m each from their mother's estate; 99.5% of his own fortune is going to charity. Her side of the story, in her words.

A golf club bought for about $54m could, by Forbes' estimate, produce a tax deduction of up to $825m. Nobody has to build anything. The club is Trump National in Jupiter, Florida. Trump bought it in 2012 for $5m plus about $49m in liabilities. Forbes puts its worth as a working golf course at about $120m. The third number is hypothetical: what the land would fetch as building plots. Forbes puts the land beneath the mansions around the course at an average of $5.9m an acre. The gap between the second and third figures is where a conservation easement lives. The rule is old and legal. A landowner who donates a promise not to develop to a qualifying land trust can claim the land's value before the promise, less its value after, as a charitable deduction. It needs a qualified appraisal and a genuine conservation purpose. Courts have accepted golf-course easements that meet the tests. In September 2025, staff from an environmental nonprofit spent three days at Jupiter counting bird species, recording bat calls and cataloguing plants. The result was a 180-page report arguing the course was natural habitat worth protecting. In December 2025, the Trump Organization donated the development rights to the Barn Group Land Trust and kept the club. The course, the clubhouse and the name on the gates stayed put. What left was the right to carve the fairways into house lots. Forbes published its investigation on 19 October 2026. It studied similar deals, spoke to eight industry experts, and applied the 74% average from Trump's four earlier easements to Jupiter's acreage. The answer: as much as $825m, give or take a couple hundred million. At the top of that range, roughly fifteen times what the club cost. The caveats matter. Trump's return is not public. A deduction reduces taxable income, which is less than cutting the tax bill dollar for dollar. Several retellings slid from "could write off" to "saved", which Forbes never said. Across five easements since 2005, Forbes says, more than $1bn of income could be sheltered and an estimated $450m of tax saved. Someone in Jupiter spent three days finding out whether the rough counts as wildlife habitat. Forbes prices the answer at up to $825m.

Forbes once put the Hermès heir Nicolas Puech at $15.6bn. Forbes, Hermès and Puech's own lawyers now all treat the shares behind that figure as gone. Search his net worth and the internet still offers a number between $11bn and $16bn, mostly written in 2023 and 2024. They were sensible figures when published. But in 2024 his lawyers told a Geneva court that he no longer owns the shares that produced them. Hermès once cited signed declarations that he held 5.8 per cent of its capital, or 6.08 million shares. He resigned from the supervisory board in August 2014. When relatives led by his brother Bertrand pooled their shares to repel LVMH, he kept his out. In a family company, abstaining counts as a vote. His money sat with Éric Freymond, a Geneva wealth manager who ran two Swiss accounts holding the Hermès stock from 1998 to 2022. Puech cut ties in 2022 and said he then discovered the shares had gone. Three complaints followed. On 12 July 2024 the Geneva appeals court found no evidence of mismanagement and dismissed all three. Puech did not appeal. Freymond, who denied all wrongdoing, died in July 2025, aged 67. Forbes ranked Puech 162nd in the world in December 2023, at $11.5bn. By December 2025 it had named him the year's biggest faller and removed him from the list. On 30 July 2025 Axel Dumas, Hermès's executive chairman, said he believed Puech no longer held the shares and that Hermès had started legal proceedings. Puech's own account, as Forbes describes it, is that his late adviser sold the stock without his knowledge to Bernard Arnault and LVMH, both of which deny it. He has sued them in Paris, seeking about €14bn. Separately, Honor America Capital sued him in Washington for more than $1.3bn, accusing him of failing to deliver shares under a sale agreement. His lawyer says he played no role in any sale. A buyer suing a man for failing to deliver shares the man says he cannot find has, at the very least, a certain symmetry. The arithmetic is still available. At the €1,238.50 close on 23 October 2026, 6.08 million shares would be worth about €7.53bn. At January's high of €2,300, almost €14bn. Shares he says he cannot find lost about 46 per cent of their value in nine months. The largest number attached to Nicolas Puech in 2026 is the €14bn he is seeking in Paris. No court has yet said whether he will see any of it.

The internet puts Gianluca Vacchi's net worth at $200m. He says a single 13.2% stake in the family firm sold for more than €700m. The two figures cannot be subtracted. One is in dollars and claims to be a net worth. The other is in euros and is a gross sale price, before tax, with part of it paid later. The firm is IMA, founded in 1961, which makes packaging and processing machinery for the pharmaceutical, food, cosmetics and e-mobility industries. Its controlling shareholder was SOFIMA, the Vacchi family holding company. His cousin Alberto runs it. Gianluca told Il Resto del Carlino he left after 30 years. BC Partners took IMA private on 10 February 2021, putting in €911m at an enterprise value of €3.5bn, a deal negotiated during Covid-19. In July 2023 it agreed to sell to BDT & MSD Partners at an enterprise value of €6.9bn, a 2.4 times return on its money. The family kept majority ownership. On those figures, the company the family half-sold during a pandemic was worth roughly twice as much two and a half years later. In January 2024 Vacchi gave his own number. "I don't usually talk figures, but I am a transparent person." The first tranche was paid at once. The rest was due "after a few years". So why $200m? Celebrity Net Worth gives that figure and mentions the sale on the same page without moving the headline. Other sites say $150m, $300m, $450m. None cites a filing. An estimate that never changes is usually a quotation of an earlier estimate. Much is still unreported: who bought the stake, what the tax bill was, what the second tranche is worth. His kebab chain, Kebhouze, lost €2m in 2022, which is a rounding error against an IMA payout. In 2020 he paid $24.5m for a house in Miami Beach. Nobody has reported whether the second tranche has arrived.

No serious outlet has published a net worth for the Earl of Devon, who owns a Grade I castle on the Exe. Charles Courtenay, 19th Earl of Devon, was born in 1975 and succeeded his father Hugh in 2015. Nobody has published a valuation of Powderham Castle, its contents or its collection either. So the sum has to be done from the outside in, the way a land agent would do it. Start with the acres. Powderham's own wedding listing says the castle is surrounded by 3,500 acres. The Daily Mail called him heir to 4,000. The firmest measure comes from Historic England: about 250 hectares of registered park and garden on the Exe Estuary. Neither family figure is official. Ownership is hazier still. DiCamillo's Companion says Powderham is personally owned by the Earl, under an "Individual / Family Trust" arrangement. That is a guidebook's summary, not a legal record. The income is the familiar English kind: weddings, children's parties, corporate events, a farm shop, a deer park. Powderham puts its headcount at 11 to 50 employees, a self-declared range rather than a payroll. The best fact is a sale in which nothing left the building. In 1987 two bookcases by John Channon were sold through Christie's to the V&A for £465,000. They remain at Powderham. The museum owns the furniture, and the castle keeps the view. The rest is on the record. His first wife is AJ Langer, the American actress from Baywatch. He filed for divorce in Los Angeles in November 2023, and in March 2026 Peerage News announced his engagement to Jemima Hannon. In the Lords he argued that if the Crown could move to gender-neutral succession in 2013, the peerage could too. Yet his son Jack is listed as heir apparent, though Joscelyn is the elder child. Then the Hereditary Peers Act abolished the 92 inherited seats, the "pending abolition" he had predicted. The seat went. The title did not. A Lords seat was never a line on a balance sheet. Whoever eventually signs for the 3,500 acres, or the 4,000, will be named in documents nobody has yet made public.

Tyler Perry has bought a $30M mansion in Puerto Rico ahead of his planned move there in 2027, according to reports. 📸 PhilipRomanoPhoto / Wikimedia Commons