David Rockefeller Jr Says He Didn T Know He Was Rich Until Other Kids At School Told Him

That probably had a lot to do with the assumption made by most kids that everybody lives the same way they do, but despite the privilege that Rockefeller grew up in (both the Upper East Side townhouse and the Westchester County country house he called home as a child, were also home to the family’s famous collection of priceless art and antiques), the Rockefellers still took a modest approach to their own wealth. They gave a lot of money to various charitable causes, and sought to raise the younger Rockefellers to value a dollar, in part with small weekly allowances. David Jr. recalls: Now, David sees real value in the way he was brought up, and that it kept him from falling into the entitlement pitfalls that young rich kids sometimes find themselves in: “I had classmates that might not have had as much money in their family as we did but who were spending a whole lot more money. I remember we were gasping at a friend, when I was 12, who took a girl out to dinner and spent $50. We were thinking, ‘Oh my god.’” In addition to being the great-grandson of John D Rockefeller, the United States’ first billionaire, David Rockefeller Jr. is now chairman of Rockefeller & Co., which purportedly seeks to continue John D’s philosophy towards wealth and charity to this day.