Anderson Cooper Wants to Teach His Sons the Value of Earning a Living

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Anderson Cooper, the son of heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, doesn't believe in inheritance.

"My dad made clear to me there wasn’t a Vanderbilt fortune waiting for me," he told People. "In retrospect, I’m really glad he did that because from the get-go, it just made it clear that whatever my mom’s past was, it had nothing to do with me from a financial standpoint.

Cooper continues, "That set me out very early on a course of wanting to work and find out what I was passionate about. I want my kids to figure out what drives them, and I want to help them figure that out." He has two sons, Wyatt, 3, and Sebastian, 19 months, that he's raising with his friend and ex, Benjamin Maisani. Both his sons are too young to speak to about wealth, Cooper says, but "it's something I have thought about, and I don't know that I have the answers to it yet."

This isn't his first time speaking about his feelings on inheritance. "I don't believe in inheriting money," Cooper once told Howard Stern. "I think it's an initiative sucker. I think it's a curse. From the time I was growing up, if I felt that there was some pot of gold waiting for me, I don't know that I would've been so motivated."

That doesn't mean he's uninterested in his family history—or examining dynasties and money. He wrote Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of American Dynasty, about his Vanderbilt family, in 2021. His new book, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune, comes out next week.

Per the publisher, "The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story—of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society."

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