A Vanderbilt heir builds a family office to court 800 relatives

Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 with an estate worth about $100 million, most of it left to his son William. A century and six generations later, a descendant named Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin is trying to turn the family name into a family office. She has formed House of Vanderbilt, which for now invests only her own money, and says she wants to recruit more than 800 living descendants of the railroad tycoon as co-investors. Most of those relatives are strangers to her.

Costin, 47, made the case over lunch at the Grand Brasserie inside Grand Central, the Manhattan terminal her ancestor conceived. "We share an extraordinary history," she told Bloomberg. "House of Vanderbilt can create a new point of connection around many of the qualities that built that legacy in the first place." She framed the firm as a way to lift relatives' dealmaking power, connect them around qualities like ambition and entrepreneurialism, and give the Vanderbilt name added shine.

The portfolio already has two named assets. SohoMuse, a networking site for models, actors, and other creatives that Costin founded in 2015, is one. Vanderbilt & Seewald Global Studio is the other, an accelerator that acquires stakes in emerging fashion designers. Both point toward her stated interest in fashion and technology. Julia Valentine, formerly head of operations at Mousse Partners, the family office for Chanel's founders, has been hired to run House of Vanderbilt. The advisory board includes former ESPN president John Skipper and Salvatore Ferragamo Jr., heir of the Italian shoe family.

The pitch is aimed at a group with no shared balance sheet. The surviving Vanderbilts divide a family tree that goes back to the 19th century, and the report says most of the 800-plus descendants are people Costin does not know. Whatever House of Vanderbilt is selling — co-investment, connection, prestige — the first conversation is likely to be a cold call.

How much money the project has behind it is hard to pin down. Costin would not disclose House of Vanderbilt's assets under management or her net worth. The Bloomberg report notes that the founding fortune seeded only a small part of her own wealth, and that the extended family's combined fortune is unclear after so much time and so many branches. The cleanest figure is the patriarch's estate at death: about $100 million, according to biographer T.J. Stiles, most of it inherited by William. That equals more than $3 billion in today's purchasing power, and roughly $373 billion as a share of the U.S. economy, the same article calculates. The economic-output comparison shows how large the fortune once loomed; the purchasing-power figure is what a modern descendant could actually hope to spend.

What House of Vanderbilt is attempting looks like the reverse of the usual sequence. It does not begin with a pool of family capital and a governance structure. It begins with a surname, a two-asset portfolio, and a prospect list of more than 800 people. The reporting does not describe fees, vehicles, or legal structure, so how a group that size would actually invest together remains an open detail. The hire of a veteran from a Chanel-family office suggests Costin wants the firm to look established while the client base is still hypothetical. The fortune that made the name famous has been divided many ways across generations; the open question is whether the descendants can be persuaded to put some of it back together under one roof. That is a sales job before it is an investing job.