But Nicole Buffett, the dreadlocked granddaughter of the notoriously frugal Nebraska mega-billionaire Warren Buffett, has lifted the veil on just how tough the so-called Oracle of Omaha makes life for his family.
In an interview published yesterday, the 32-year-old artist reveals that she has been financially cut off by her grandfather and lives on the money she makes selling her paintings.
In part because of her famous surname, she has made about $US40,000 ($57,000) in sales this year from her modest base in the hippie enclave of Berkeley, outside San Francisco.
"For most people, your life is largely determined by the wealth you were - or weren`t - born into," Ms Buffett told Marie Claire. "But our family was supposed to be a meritocracy."
The 78-year-old Buffett, who proudly still lives in the Omaha suburban home he bought for $US31,500 in 1958 and drives himself in an American-made car, believes in holding on to the values he grew up with and so eschews the usual trappings of obscene wealth. When he bought a corporate jet a decade ago, he named it "The Indefensible".
Nor does Mr Buffett believe in rewarding those he calls "members of the lucky sperm club".
His disdain for dynastic wealth has meant that he limits his generosity to his grandchildren to paying for their education and living expenses while they are students.
"I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing," Mr Buffet once said.
Mr Buffett in the first half of this year supplanted Bill Gates as the world`s richest man with an estimated net worth of $US62 billion, according to Forbes magazine. It was the first time in 15 years the title belonged to someone other than the Microsoft co-founder.
Yet in 2006, Mr Buffett, the world`s savviest investor who served as an adviser to Barack Obama during the presidential campaign - and was touted as a possible Treasury secretary - paid himself only $US100,000 in salary.
Nicole Buffett`s troubles with her grandfather began when she broke the family code and spoke about life as a Buffett. She appeared in a documentary made by Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, about wealth, entitled The One Percent, who asked her how her grandfather would react to seeing her.
"I definitely fear judgment," she said. "Money is the spoke in my grandfather`s wheel of life."
She later told Oprah Winfrey that she felt "completely excluded" from her family`s wealth.
