In this article, we will take a deeper look into the largest family offices in the world, ranked by their assets.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, a family office is a privately held company that handles investment and wealth management for a wealthy family. Most commonly, the family would have at least $50 million to $100 million in investable assets since operating the family office could cost over $1 million a year. The main goal of a family office is to effectively grow and transfer family wealth across generations.

Family offices may also handle other family-related tasks, but we will primarily focus on financial management.

From a legal standpoint, a family office operates similarly to a corporation or an LLC. Its employees are usually compensated with incentives based on the profits or capital gains it generates.

Family offices might invest in a wide range of assets. These range from private markets, such as private equity, venture capital and hedge funds, to listed equities, bonds, funds and real estate.

DuPont and Rockefeller families are considered the pioneers of family offices, starting them up in the 19th century. However, family offices started increasing in popularity only fairly recently, starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2010s, after many tech companies started to experience stellar growth.

The most common type of family office is the single-family office, which manages the wealth of a single family. However, there could be multi-family offices (managing the wealth of multiple families) or virtual family offices (managing the wealth of geographically scattered families). In this article, we will focus mostly on single-family offices.

We have contacted most family offices from this list with an inquiry to share their information but have not received answers. Therefore, the data we present is collected from multiple sources (mainly the SWF Institute ranking, checked in September 2026, plus the family offices’ and their companies’ own websites).

Top 20 largest family offices by assets

According to the SWF Institute ranking (September 2026), the largest family office worldwide is Walton Enterprises LLC, with about $225 billion, followed by Cascade Investment (Bill Gates) and Dubai Holding.

Family office statistics

If we take a closer look at the biggest family offices, some interesting statistics emerge. The nine largest in SWFI’s ranking with published figures manage about $1.07 trillion between them.

To put things into perspective, the largest university endowment in the world, Harvard’s, was worth about $68 billion at 30 June 2026, after a 27.1% return in its 2026 fiscal year. If it were a family office, it would rank ninth, just ahead of Waycrosse.

Geographically, North America dominates. Of SWFI’s top 100 family offices, 54 are based in North America, 32 in Europe, 8 in Asia, 3 in Australia and the Pacific, 2 in Latin America and 1 in the Middle East. Africa has none.

The UBS Global Family Office Report 2026 gives a good picture of how family offices invest. It surveyed 307 family offices in more than 30 markets, with an average net worth of $2.7 billion per family. Their average strategic asset allocation for 2025 was:

Equities (public and private) still make up around half of the portfolio. For 2026, family offices plan to add to developed-market bonds, private debt and gold, while cutting cash and real estate. A record 60% planned to change their allocation in the following 12 months.

Digital assets remain a small niche: only 24% of family offices hold crypto or other digital assets, and most of those that do keep it to around 1% to 3% of the portfolio.

When asked about the biggest risks for the next 12 months, family offices put a major geopolitical conflict first (64%), followed by a global trade war (49%) and higher inflation (36%).

List of the top 20 largest family offices

The largest family office in the world is Walton Enterprises LLC, which manages around $225 billion for the Walton family, descendants of Sam Walton. Sam Walton founded Walmart in 1962 and passed ownership to his heirs before he died in 1992. Walmart has about 2.1 million employees and was the world’s largest company by revenue for 12 years, until Amazon overtook it in the 2026 Fortune Global 500.

The second-largest family office manages much of the wealth of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Cascade Investment‘s assets are run by Cascade Asset Management Company, which also manages the endowment of the Gates Foundation. Gates left his full-time role at Microsoft in 2008 to focus on the foundation, which he has said will spend its resources and close by 2045.

Dubai Holding is a global investment holding company and the largest family office in the Middle East. It manages the wealth of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and Vice President of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It holds around $136 billion in assets across several countries, including some of the most valuable real estate in Dubai.

Pontegadea manages the investments of Amancio Ortega, the founder of Inditex, the owner of Zara and Bershka and one of the largest fashion retailers in the world. Ortega receives large annual dividends from his Inditex stake, much of which Pontegadea invests in prime real estate around the world.

Bezos Expeditions manages the personal investments of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It invests in seed, early-stage and late-stage venture capital across many sectors. Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 and became executive chair.

Mousse Partners manages the wealth of Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, the French brothers who own the luxury fashion house Chanel. Their grandfather, Pierre Wertheimer, was Coco Chanel’s business partner and helped finance the launch of Chanel N°5 in the 1920s.

A family office managing the assets of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s former CEO (2000 to 2014) and owner of the LA Clippers, and his wife Connie. It focuses mostly on philanthropy, especially helping children born in poor families with economic mobility. Ballmer was Gates’s classmate at Harvard and was hired by Gates in 1980 as the 30th employee at Microsoft.

Edizione is the holding company of the Italian Benetton family, founded in 1981. Besides the Benetton clothing brand, it holds stakes in the infrastructure group Mundys, the travel retailer Avolta, the telecom towers company Cellnex and the insurer Generali.

Founded in 1991, Waycrosse manages the wealth of the Cargill family, owners of Cargill Inc., which Forbes ranks as the largest private company in the US by revenue ($154 billion in its latest fiscal year). Cargill trades, processes and distributes grain and other agricultural commodities, and also produces food ingredients and animal nutrition products.

Fedesa manages the fortune of the Italian Ferrero family, owners of Ferrero, which describes itself as the third-largest chocolate confectionery company in the world, with turnover of €19.3 billion in the year to August 2025. Ferrero is a private company known for its discretion.

Formed in 1998 as MSD Capital, this family office manages the assets of Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Technologies, and his family, and was later renamed DFO Management. It invests across technology, real estate, sports and other sectors.

Founded in 1970 as a hedge fund, Soros Fund Management became a family office in 2011, when it returned outside investors’ money. It manages the wealth of George Soros and his family, as well as the endowment of the Open Society Foundations. George Soros is still its chair, and Dawn Fitzpatrick is its CEO and CIO.

KIRKBI manages the assets of the Danish Kirk Kristiansen family, owners of the LEGO Group. It owns 75% of LEGO, with the LEGO Foundation owning the rest. Since 2019, it also owns 50% of Merlin Entertainments, the operator of the LEGOLAND parks, alongside Blackstone and CPP Investments.

Named after the author Ralph Waldo Emerson, this family office manages the assets of Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the late Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs. Their investments and philanthropic contributions mostly focus on education, immigration reform, the environment, media and journalism, and health. The company itself defines its operations as “philanthrocapitalism”.

Carl Bennet AB is the investment company of Swedish businessman Carl Bennet. Its main holdings are controlling stakes in the medical technology group Getinge, the industrial group Lifco, the printing group Elanders and the medical equipment maker Arjo.

Weybourne is the family office of British inventor Sir James Dyson, founder of the Dyson appliance company. It manages the family’s investments beyond Dyson, including property and farming.

Crosby Advisors manages the wealth of the Johnson family, which controls Fidelity Investments. Edward C. Johnson II founded Fidelity in 1946, and it has become one of the largest asset managers in the world. Fidelity is still private: members of the Johnson family, including CEO Abigail Johnson, hold 49% of the voting power.

Vulcan was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and his sister Jody Allen to manage his investments and philanthropy. After Paul Allen died in 2018, it continued to manage his estate, and in 2022 its investment arm was spun off as Cercano Management.

Delfin is the Luxembourg holding company of the heirs of Leonardo Del Vecchio, the founder of Luxottica. It is the parent company and largest shareholder of EssilorLuxottica, the world’s largest eyewear group.

PremjiInvest is the family office of Azim Premji, the Indian businessman who built Wipro into one of India’s largest IT services companies. It invests in public and private companies, and its returns help fund the Azim Premji Foundation.

Other large family offices

Several family offices that featured in earlier versions of our ranking no longer appear in SWFI’s top 20, either because of updated figures or because SWFI reclassified them. They include Bayshore Global Management (Sergey Brin), The Woodbridge Company (the Thomson family, the majority owner of Thomson Reuters), Athos (the Strüngmann brothers, early backers of BioNTech), the Hartono family office (owners of Djarum and Bank Central Asia), Fingerboard (the Newhouse family) and Euclidean Capital (the family of Renaissance Technologies founder Jim Simons, who died in May 2024).

Conclusion

While mostly founded for wealth preservation and growth, family offices can also serve other purposes. Some of these include philanthropy, tax optimisation, and more. North America, and the US in particular, still leads, with more than half of the 100 largest family offices.

Family offices are more common in the Western world, partly for legal and tax reasons and partly for cultural ones.

As we saw earlier, behind sometimes misleading names of the companies, we can find some of the most famous people in the world, including founders of some of the most valuable companies today. However, some family offices operate more secretly, and their owners aren’t as prominent publicly. Also, not all the wealthiest people in the world choose to use the family office type of company to manage their and their families’ wealth.

FAQs