The wheels of 21st century capitalism have turned very effectively for holders of private wealth. One sign of this is the rapid proliferation of family offices, as these are private institutions tasked with guarding and deploying private capital. A Deloitte study estimated that in 2024 there were around 8,000 single family offices globally, and forecasted that number to increase to nearly 11,000 by 2030. The total number of family office vehicles of various types is already roughly 35,000 globally, according to technology providers to such offices.

Data from UBS and Forbes indicates that roughly 250 people achieved billionaire status in the United States over the last decade. Even as much of this wealth has been generated from outcomes in the tech sector, it is reasonable to assume that ongoing rapid AI advances might further accelerate this trend as we start to see multibillion dollar exits from very small teams or even individuals.

Family offices, however structurally organized, are the most nimble of financial organizations. They are generally not beholden to the sort of corporate governance, mandates, and fiduciary obligations that public and private corporations are; they are beholden only to whatever governance mechanisms they have chosen for themselves.

Yet, despite this proliferation of private wealth with these degrees of freedom, we see surprisingly few expressions of wealth that actually make use of such freedom. Basically everything follows the same old playbook: funds that seek to beat the market are getting in on the private equity era and fighting for direct allocation in venture deals. Even most venture studios seek merely to replicate traditional market opportunity-finding and startup-building in-house. Similarly, most philanthropy is still, even when a net positive, effectively interchangeable—one prominent surname on a museum or a hospital wing might just as well be another.

What is conspicuously missing is a large number of “great works”—commercial, philanthropic, or other unusual projects—that only the person commissioning them could have created. Works such as these are a truly unique blend of their sponsor’s perspective, experiences, passions, and values. The intention, care, and effort great works are undertaken with is unmistakable. They carry a quality of heft and meaningfulness that most projects do not. They ask something of us, they invite us to reconsider our actions and to raise our aspirations. They stir our hearts.

While human history abounds with many examples of great works, such as the Medicis’ farsighted patronage of the arts, or Andrew Carnegie’s thousands of libraries, contemporary examples are much more sparse. This is especially surprising given the sheer scale of modern private wealth that presumably is available for such pursuits.The relatively few projects with great works qualities that we do see in recent times are tantalizing glimpses of what a world would look like with abundant creative deployment of capital that clearly expresses a unique point of view for public benefit.

Examples include Nat Friedman’s PlasticList project, an independent research initiative to test food products for microplastics and publicize the results, and his Vesuvius Challenge, which marshalled resources to support using AI to map the Herculaneum scrolls. The scrolls are a set of 1,800 Roman scrolls that were carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, making them impossible to read if not for advanced imaging techniques.

Institutional examples include the for-the-love-of-the-game artisanal publishing at Stripe Press, which ostensibly has nothing to do with their core business of building payment rails, but delights intellectuals with beautiful works, or the Berggruen Institute, which was founded in 2010 by a successful finance entrepreneur, converting his financial capital into intellectual innovation as a think tank pursuing unorthodox contemplation and global projects.

Some examples span an entire career or body of work of a single person. Stewart Brand comes to mind, as he’s had many unique projects over the years, from his Whole Earth Catalogue in the 1970s—just recently made available as a comprehensive archive via the Whole Earth Index, itself a great work and substantial undertaking—to his 10,000 year clock, an ambitious centerpiece project of the Long Now Foundation, for which Brand is Cofounder & President.

Smaller, everyday examples can sometimes be spotted in the wild, but are hard to generalize because each is bespoke. A good friend of mine self-publishes a seasonal magazine chronicling his adventures in the mountains of Southern Idaho. While modest and intimate, this meets my mark of a great work because while you read it, you can’t help but be stirred by the beautiful photography and the awareness that this publication was created by a singular human to convey his love of the mountains and the effect that they have on him.

Our Wealth Narratives Fail the Wealthy

Given how feasible it should be for holders of private wealth to create or commission such works, especially at a smaller scale, we must assume that the main reason they aren’t doing it is because there are so few role models—it genuinely doesn’t occur to them. Or, more precisely, we might assume that the dominant cultural narratives and role models that they do possess have narrowed any intuitive drive to create great works into the category of purely commercial pursuits: company valuation milestones, exits or initial public offerings (IPOs), and other such financial successes.

It is not just society that misses out on beautiful grand projects in the form of great works, large and small. The principals of private wealth themselves are being deprived of an opportunity to further self-actualize through the creation of a public legacy.

Many founders who manage to sell their business built companies that were not their great work, so they have yet to experience the thrill of this pursuit. Same goes for the heirs and principals-to-be of family offices; it was previously-built empires that bestowed upon them their golden fields of possibility. Now they only need to decide what to do with the harvest. Wealth can be thought of as temporarily stored kinetic energy. When people spend energy to shape the world, what they spend it on in turn shapes them. Deploying energy in the form of capital, time, and attention on projects that are direct manifestations of your dreams, your delights, your callings—this deployment brings personal development and self-discovery, whether the projects succeed or fail.

Many wealthy people instinctively hold a series of negative or self-limiting conscious or subconscious beliefs relating to the wealth they hold, stories about the role of wealth they’ve been told by society since birth. These often accumulate as a contradictory jumble of thoughts and feelings such as: my wealth is, at the root, bad or ill-gotten, and so it should be kept hidden; I should use my money to acquire status, as that will lead to respect; as a wealthy person it is not appropriate to share my personal struggles with the world, as people expect me to be basically happy and stress-free. These narratives create a psychospiritual bind, one that neither larger commercial success nor traditional compliance-centred philanthropy is going to address.

The genuine pursuit of great works is a viable path out of this psychological thicket. Creating beautiful, interesting, societally-relevant things that are expressions of your unique experience is a road less traveled—a way of deploying capital that is much less likely to incur such criticism from the peanut gallery. The more genuine and introspective the projects, the more suited they are to this purpose.

In the last two decades, the general sentiment that businesses should be a force for societal improvement have taken the form of a few movements within the business world, including social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, social innovation, and corporate social responsibility. However, these fields were largely overtaken by events in politics—such as the unexpected rise of Donald Trump in 2016—as well as developments in technology, specifically the largely unexpected breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) followed by unprecedented AI compute scaling. With politics and technology now acting as the dominant forces of societal change, business has perhaps taken a backseat.

These previous attempts at harnessing the role of business for social change have largely fizzled out while the tectonic plates of traditional, sclerotic philanthropy (compliance-focused foundations as gatekeepers of money, prestige, and virtue) have ground on, delivering little in the way of notable improvements. Have any of our societal problems this philanthropy aims to address been solved in the last ten years?

The family office sector can be as influential as politics and technology, if its principals realize the role they can play, embrace a more active sense of societal stewardship, and take seriously the pursuit of great works.

There is no time to waste! The world has become more malleable than ever for those with the will to act and deploy capital in this way. Trump’s approach to governance in his second administration has halted much “change-making” work that previous administrations championed using the federal apparatus. Governance ideologies aside, this means that certain types of work will need to be done by individuals or organizations, for the time being, if they are to advance.

In evaluating our society’s overall ability to marshal talent, there is much room for improvement. There are huge numbers of talented but unmotivated or under-employed people in the United States. This includes everything from creatives and artists to coordinators and technologists; hard working people who are desperate for projects that ignite their passions and feel meaningful. Advancements in AI are yielding operating leverage to that same talent, allowing small teams to accomplish what would previously have required entire departments or organizations.

Family office principals—especially newly-minted entrepreneurial ones and forward-looking heirs inheriting enough wealth to let them build small teams of motivated partners—should open their eyes and seize this opportunity by pursuing great works that express their distinct values. In many cases this may be most effectively done in a “full contact” fashion: building a small dedicated team to directly accomplish the outcome that you’re looking to see in the world, rather than setting up a new institution to hand the job over to others, or relegating the responsibility to an existing one.

Beacons in the Twilight

The highest leverage great works can be conceptualized as beacons that crack open the imagination, proving that real innovation is possible and offering compelling prototypes that can be replicated by those with less risk-tolerance. These examples are just an illustrative taste.

Buy that beautiful historic building on Main Street and renovate it into something that will delight the community, even if the project doesn’t pencil. Too much of our country’s built landscape is devoid of soul, owing to the confines of commercial real estate development hurdles. Do it anyway.

Hire an intrepid journalist, analyst, or applied research team to dive deep into a hunch that you have about the world. Give them the resources they need and publish their findings for others to learn from. Information begets action and behavioral change. What information is waiting to be discovered and made public by your efforts?

Fund a direct-influence campaign in your county or state, to add legislative seats whose obligation is to advocate and vote on behalf of future generations, the natural world, or even AI agents themselves. We must start developing governance mechanisms that better embrace our role as active influencers of our planetary systems, but real experiments will never happen without risk-taking capital pushing on the levers.

For those with even larger ambitions: develop a new, compelling place for people to live and work. Swing for the fences—pool your resources with other visionaries and fund the design and development of a fully operational arcology, a self-reliant ecological community somewhere deep in a climate haven, acting as a prototype of climate-aligned living. If that is too ambitious, then systematically acquire and fully redevelop a small town in the hinterlands to achieve a similar end, testing new forms of local governance and community engagement.

A more traditionally commercial great work might be simply selecting a values-aligned idea from a credible “request for startups” list and working to build a formidable team to take a shot at that goal. Serious patrons fielding custom-built teams to tackle specific high-signal opportunities would have a fighting chance. Or, adopt an existing visionary project when it’s still a glint in the founder’s eye, and help it become a reality.

As these projects work differently than the common machinery of for-profit commercial venture building, a few words of advice may be in order for those deciding to step into the pursuit of great works. If you don’t already have a vision for the impact you’d like to create, you need to create some empty space—away from screens and your usual routines. Great intuitions and glimpses bubble up from a still, reflective mind.

When you have a glimpse, ground it by spending real time with the communities and people who will be most affected by your project. No great works are done “to” other people, and at their best they are done with those intended to enjoy them.

Once your vision is coming into focus, you will need a “mirror.” This is a person who comes to understand your ideas, and through dialogue reflects them back to you in a process that makes them become real. Ideally this person is also an integrator-operator, who can help you operationalize the work by building the team.

As always, you must find the right people, those who resonate with the work you want to do. But in this case, once you have them, you mustn’t control them too tightly. Earnest people who are lending their talents to your vision carry important pieces of the work. If you micromanage them or ignore their intuitions, the dream will wither and deflate, the magic will subside.

So this is the invitation. If you are a holder of material wealth, and you have not yet walked the path of embarking on a great work of your own: the road is yours for the taking. The world needs exactly what it is you have to offer, and you will become more of yourself along the journey to deliver it.