trailed Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate, by 20 points among millennial voters in this year’s Democratic presidential primary. In their time, the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor has pushed left-wing politics back into the American political mainstream. Class and inequality have been part of the political conversation for most of their adult lives. The youngest of them were 15 in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the have-a-lots and everyone else the oldest, if they were lucky, were working in a post-recession economy even before the current recession. Most of his fellow millennials, however, are receiving a rotten inheritance - debt, dim job prospects and a figment of a social safety net. Jacobs, whose grandfather was a founder of Qualcomm, expects to receive up to $100 million over the course of his lifetime. Tens of trillions of dollars are expected to pass between generations in just the next decade.Īnd that money, like all wealth in the United States, is extremely concentrated in the upper brackets. Millennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in American history - the Great Wealth Transfer, as finance types call it. He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality. Jacobs sees his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” as both a moral and economic failure. “I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” he said.Ī socialist since college, Mr. He doesn’t want to do that, but by wealth management standards, his plan is just as bad. At 25, he’s hit the age when many heirs can blow their money on harebrained businesses or a stable of sports cars. He’s trying to gain access to more of his $30 million trust fund. Lately, Sam Jacobs has been having a lot of conversations with his family’s lawyers.