In 1918, Forbes Magazine published a list of the 30 richest Americans.  At the top was oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, Sr, whose wealth was estimated at a whopping $1.2 billion — more than 5 times as much as his closest rival for the title of richest American, Henry Frick.   But by that time, Senior had already started giving much of his vast fortune  to charity; by the time he died in 1937, he had given away a total of precisely $530,853,632.

He also had passed along $470 million to his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr --  forty times what he gave to either of his surviving daughters --  because he trusted  his son to give most of that away, too, which  Junior proceeded to do, giving away around $500 million before he died in 1960, while still passing on around $160 million to his own six children.  

The will of Wellington Burt, a Michigan timber baron who died in 1919, created a trust for his $13 million estate that called for less than 1% of it to be distributed annually until 20 years after his last grandchild had died.  Although his family would fight the will in court for the next 40 years, in 2011 a  dozen  lucky descendants of Burt’s ranging from 19 to 94 split a $100 million jackpot when the trust was finally dissolved.

On Oct 15, 1906, a legal battle over the estate of the drug industry pioneer William Weightman, which was worth $40-100 million dollars, came to a sudden, screeching halt when a mysterious note was introduced as evidence.  Asked about its contents, the husband of Weightman’s granddaughter said that "I would rather have my tongue cut out than reveal what was in that paper." The contents of the note were never revealed.  In this episode, I play history detective and offer a theory about what that note said and why it ended the case so quickly.