The Great Wealth Transfer is a mess, actually

The windfall is colossal, but so are the uncertainties around it

• A garbage dump in Malta looks just like a garbage dump anywhere less glamorous. Photo by Evan Demicoli on Unsplash

The upper echelons of the art trade are justifiably obsessed with the Great Wealth Transfer, the consensus moniker for the trillions of dollars set to pass from high- and ultra-high-net-worth individuals to their heirs in the roughly two decades ahead. But like most obsessions, the strength of the fixation here may depend partly on how little is known about its object. The deeper I’ve dug into the Great Wealth Transfer, the more apparent it has become that many of the parties most directly involved in the largest asset reallocation since our species began keeping records are, in a very real sense, just kinda winging it.

There is no better emblem of this dynamic than the uncertainty around the amount of the transfer itself. If you ask someone knowledgeable in the art trade how much wealth is set to change hands in this historic windfall, they will probably tell you $84 trillion over the next 20 years. That’s because this is the figure included in the 2025 edition of the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, the most cited quantitative study in the art industry.

Yet that projection is already out of date among people in the wealth management sector, it seems. The more recent, more eyebrow-torching estimate, from a December 2024 report by the Boston-based market research firm Cerulli Associates, is that $124 trillion will transfer by 2048—in the US alone. In other words, almost 50% more wealth will pass to new owners in just three more years than was previously thought, and all strictly within one country.

If analysts’ finding another $40 trillion stuck between the couch cushions of the overclass gives you whiplash, consider this: pretty much all of the data in circulation about the Great Wealth Transfer comes from Cerulli Associates (including the earlier $84 trillion estimate). I almost wrote a post about that fact a few months ago but pulled back because I decided that I, a humble small business owner mostly working out of my apartment, had to be missing something obvious to Wall Street types. Then an extremely knowledgeable person in finance told me, unprompted, that Cerulli essentially has a monopoly on the projections about this hinge moment in financial history—which is why access to the company’s annual report on the high- and ultra-high-net-worth markets in the US costs a knee-buckling $21,000 a pop.

One aspect of this information asymmetry is justified. The reality is that personal financial reporting requirements in the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK and Western Europe) tend to be drastically more rigorous than in other regions. To paraphrase one economist I questioned about this dilemma recently: How do you go about estimating the value of a plot of land in Riyadh? Does anyone really know how much Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping is worth, let alone the rest of the wealthiest people in the countries they govern? Just think about how much time, effort, and money goes into concealing the enormity of the assets controlled in offshore accounts and other tax havens, and you start to get a sense of how big the blind spot may be.

That’s all fine. I can also reverse-engineer a reasonable argument for how and why a firm like Cerulli might have been able to corner the market on this particular niche of research in this particular part of the world (first-mover advantage, single-minded focus, regional specificity, etc). Even still, it seems unbelievable that most, if not all, business sectors that depend to an extraordinary extent on the behaviors of the very wealthy would rely on the same single source for critical data about a multitrillion-dollar, world-historical transfer of wealth—and that most professionals one level removed wouldn’t even realize it. Yet here we are.

A sad estate of affairs

Believe it or not, the situation gets wilder. Suppose I asked you to guess what percentage of billionaire families had even the most basic estate-planning infrastructure in place today. Suppose I even gave you a hint by saying that 90% was too high, and so was 80%.

Go ahead. Think of a number. I’ll wait.

Ready?

If you guessed much more than half, I’m here to tell you that the data suggests you are giving the extremely wealthy way too much credit.

This is one of the key findings from the 2025 edition of UBS’s Global Family Office Report. A “family office,” for the uninitiated, is a private entity created and maintained exclusively to manage the assets and other affairs of a single rich person or family. The report compiles the answers from a survey of 317 of the family offices in UBS’s client base, with the average respondent managing around $1.1bn of wealth for families with an average net worth of $2.7bn.

Among this group, only 53% of families had an estate plan, or even a basic will, in place by early April of this year. That share is actually up significantly from 2024, when only 47% of respondents could say the same. Even the two highest-achieving regions in the sample—the US and Southeast Asia—aren’t exactly blowing away the competition, either; more than one-third of the survey respondents in each said their client families had no succession or inheritance infrastructure settled despite billions of dollars in assets hanging in the balance.

It's not difficult to find ripple effects of this nonchalance in the art trade if you ask the right people. An executive at a major US storage and logistics company specializing in fine art recently told me that it’s relatively common for their storage clients to neglect to grant any kind of secondary account privileges to family members, employees, or anyone else during their lifetime. This means that, when death or incapacitation comes for the account holder, not only the control but even the knowledge of what that person was holding offsite could fall into a legal gray zone that might take months or years to climb out of, since the storage company won’t be permitted to release the information to any parties not directly authorized. (The red tape will be especially thick if there’s no will, as seems to be the case for so many of the richest families out there.)

To art-trade intermediaries, in contrast, the Great Wealth Transfer is as serious as a heart attack—a cliché I am only allowing myself to use here because heart disease remains the leading cause of death among Americans of all income levels. Dealers, auction houses, advisors, and more are increasingly fixated on the seismic potential of the next 20-ish years’ worth of bequests to reshape the topography of the industry, and they should be. Despite all their focus, however, the unknowns about this epic jackpot still far outnumber the knowns—and if the soon-to-depart benefactors don’t begin treating their mortality with the same urgency as everyone else in the trade, the enormity of the mess they leave behind will be as historic as the enormity of the assets buried in it.