Five years ago, Marlene Engelhorn found out exactly how much money she stood to inherit.
A descendant of German industrialist Friedrich Engelhorn, founder of chemicals company BASF, the Austrian heiress was by that point familiar with the trappings of wealth: She’d attended an elite private French lycée, lived in a mansion in Vienna, and knew her family’s lawyer so well that she thought he was her uncle. But it wasn’t until 2020 that the Austrian heiress learned the extent of her inheritance from her elderly grandmother — a figure her family asked her not to disclose, but enough to make her a multimillionaire.