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Edited By: Andrew Gonzales
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#succession #business #finance
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Succession is a HBO tv series that focuses on the problematic family relationships of the Roy family patriarch Logan Roy and his four children, Kendal, Siobhan, Roman and Connor.
The family is incredibly wealthy thanks to their company Waystar Royco a conservative media conglomerate with operations in news, television, theme parks and cruises. It’s never overtly mentioned by the showrunners, but this is very similar to the real life Murdoch family who also own a media empire and have had their fair share of family drama. At the very least the show took a dash of inspiration from these controversial public figures. The driving force of family tension in the show is a series of big corporate events around ownership of the company with the children vying for control over the business when their elderly father (a man with declining health) passes on. You don’t NEED to understand the details of the business deals to enjoy the show but it would definitely help and the producers style of show don’t tell doesn’t leave much room for exposition so without an MBA or a background in corporate law it is easy to get a little bit lost. There are four big business deals and idea that you really need to understand to fully grasp the complex Machiavellian backstabbing and family intrigue that takes place.
It’s quickly established that the family owns their share of Waystar Royco through a family holding company which is in turn owned by a family trust, a very popular asset management structure for wealthy high-profile businesspeople. We see real life examples of this exact holding structure all the time because it protects the families’ assets in the event that either Waystar gets sued or they themselves personally get sued something that is highly likely given how the family members conduct themselves in the show.
There are two parties that you need to understand when talking about trusts, the trustee and the beneficiary. The beneficiary or beneficiaries are the parties that benefit from payments made by the trust. Trust fund babies are called that because they are beneficiaries of family trusts. The other party to understand is the trustee, the trustee is the manager of the trust and they get to make decisions about what the trust does, if a trusts wants to buy or sell an asset for example that decision is made by the trustee not the beneficiary.
The trustee can also be a beneficiary but it’s not always the case. A trustee can also be a trusted representative like a family lawyer, or it can be a separate company, known as a corporate trustee as is the case with the Roy family trust. The known members of the trustee company are logans ex-wife Caroline Collingwood, who also gave voting power to her three children, Siobhan, Kendal and Roman as part of her divorce settlement that took place before the show started. The final two people with voting power are Connor Roy the eldest son born to a mother who is never mentioned in the show and Logan Roy himself.
Logan has double voting power in the family holding company presumably because he is a control freak and he was responsible for building the company that made the trust worth anything in the first place. Everybody else has one vote. If the family wants to make any big changes, they can all vote on it using this corporate structure. The family trust simply does what the corporate trustee tells it to do, and the corporate trustee is just a shell company owned by these family members who can tell the company what to do through a shareholder vote.
Early in the show a big plot point is that Logan Roy wants to add his new wife to the family trust as a beneficiary, and change his will to have Marcia inherit his double voting power in the trustee company upon his death. The children will all be wealthy no matter what because the trust defines a stake that they each own in the company which is worth between five-hundred million dollars and two billion dollars depending on the companies valuation throughout the series. This does not include any other assets that the family holding company could own or any assets that the family members have acquired individually.
So it’s time to learn How Money Works to find out how the business dealings in succession actually work.