Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin is one century and six generations removed from the man who built one of America’s most storied fortunes and seeded a small part of her own. Still, she’s building a family office she hopes will serve as a financial nexus for the 800-plus descendants of railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Costin’s new investment firm, House of Vanderbilt, comprises just her money for now, but she’s aiming to draw in other families as co-investors including her Vanderbilt relatives, most of whom she doesn’t know. She sees the firm as a way to augment their dealmaking potential but also bond over presumably shared values like ambition and entrepreneurialism and burnish the family name.
“We share an extraordinary history,” said Costin, 47, who spoke recently over lunch at the Grand Brasserie in Grand Central, the iconic train station conceived by the family patriarch. “House of Vanderbilt can create a new point of connection around many of the qualities that built that legacy in the first place.”
The investment firm’s portfolio includes SohoMuse, a networking site for models, actors and other creatives that Costin founded in 2015, and Vanderbilt & Seewald Global Studio, a business accelerator that acquires stakes in emerging fashion designers.
Costin said she’s looking to make more investments in the fashion and technology sectors and she’s hired Julia Valentine, a former head of operations at Mousse Partners, the family office for the founders of Chanel, to run House of Vanderbilt. Its advisory board includes former ESPN President John Skipper and Salvatore Ferragamo Jr. of the Italian shoe dynasty.
Costin declined to share how much money House of Vanderbilt currently manages or her net worth. The size of the extended clan’s current fortune is unclear and estimating it is difficult given the amount the time that’s passed and the number of branches who trace their lineage back to the 19th century tycoon.
‘Surplus Money’
Cornelius Vanderbilt’s estate at the time of his death in 1877 was worth about $100 million, according to his biographer T.J. Stiles, most of which was left to his son William. That’s equivalent to more than $3 billion today in terms of purchasing power, though as a share of the country’s economic output his wealth was equivalent to about $373 billion in 2026 terms, making him richer than anyone today except Elon Musk.
Generational wealth wasn’t a priority for the senior Vanderbilt, said Eric Schoenberg, a psychologist and Columbia University lecturer whose academic research focuses on wealth and money. “He didn’t really believe in the idea of a family fortune. He thought the point of the surplus money was power, and splitting the money up would dilute that.”
William Vanderbilt managed to double the family’s fortune but the third generation were prolific spenders, building opulent mansions on New York’s Fifth Avenue and in Newport, Rhode Island. Vanderbilt descendant Anderson Cooper described his family’s inherited wealth as a kind of “pathology” that warped future generations and normalized reckless spending. (Costin said in response that “the Vanderbilt legacy has always been about far more than a fortune.”)
John D. Rockefeller formed what’s considered the first family office in the early 1880s to consolidate and manage his investments, creating a concept that’s been copied thousands of times since to structure a family’s assets and defend against the wealth erosion that occurs as money filters down through successive heirs. Even the Rockefellers weren’t immune: They’re absent from the ranks of world’s richest families, which is mostly comprised of clans whose wealth was minted from companies formed within the past century, like the Waltons of Walmart Inc. or the industrialist Kochs.
Still, Costin looked to the Rockefellers when conceiving House of Vanderbilt, namely to Rockefeller Capital Management, a multifamily office formed in 2019 that sprung from the Rockefellers’ original family office. Former Morgan Stanley Wealth Management executive Greg Fleming, who founded the firm in 2018 with backing from hedge fund Viking Global, has leveraged the Rockefeller name to scale the family office into a far bigger and more ambitious enterprise. As of June, the firm said it’s responsible for $224 billion in client assets, a sliver of which is the Rockefellers’.
“Family offices are hot, no doubt a further sign of the new gilded age,” Columbia’s Schoenberg said. “But like most things humans do, I think it’s very faddish. People do it because they think it’s ‘cool’ or that they’re supposed to have one without really considering whether it suits their individual situation and goals.”
Family Legacy
Costin was born in New York to Serena Vanderbilt Van Ingen McCallum, a photographer and life coach who was also a descendant of oil tycoon Charles Pratt, and Brackenridge Costin, also a life coach. Raised in London, her first career was in music, as a dance-pop singer-songwriter where she sometimes drew on her family history for source material.
Her experiences trying to navigate the complexities of publishing rights and learning to advocate for herself in the music business led her to founding SohoMuse, with a handful of backers including a small European media group. She also designed a jewelry line inspired by Vanderbilt heirlooms that she sold on Home Shopping Network.
Costin, who declined to give details about House of Vanderbilt’s current or prospective holdings beyond SohoMuse and its fashion accelerator, said she’s using an outsourced CIO firm to lead investment decisions. Her focus is brand. She’s signed with talent agency WME to explore ways to bring the story of the Vanderbilts, who she calls “the most quiet” of the storied industrialist dynasties, to new audiences.
“My hope is that House of Vanderbilt can broaden the way people think about the Vanderbilt name,” she said. “The best way to honor a legacy is to continue creating one.”
Written by: Devon Pendleton — With assistance from Ben Steverman @Bloomberg
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