One Of The Richest Members Of Congress Owes His Fortune To A 150-Year-Old American Invention
ByBrian Warneron November 19, 2024inArticles›Entertainment
On election day, a politician named Dan Goldman easily won reelection to continue serving as the congressman representing New York’s 10th district. That district includes lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. He was originally elected to the seat back in 2022 after spending $5 million of his own money on the campaign. Why are we talking about Dan Goldman today on CelebrityNetWorth? Good question!
A Classic American Fortune
According to his latest financial disclosure, Dan Goldman’s net worth is in the range of $250 million . That makes him one of the twenty richest members of Congress today. One of the more notable disclosures in his financial report is a $50 million line of credit at Goldman Sachs.
Dan Goldman was born in February 1976 to Richard and Susan Goldman. Susan’s maiden name is Sachs. Considering Dan’s last name is Goldman, his mother’s maiden name is Sachs, and the fact that Dan has a $50 million line of credit at Goldman Sachs, I wouldn’t blame you for guessing that his quarter-billion-dollar fortune is connected to Goldman Sachs. It’s not. The name similarity is purely a coincidence.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Connection to the Fortune
Dan’s father’s parents were Richard and Rhoda Goldman. Rhoda’s maiden name was Haas.
Rhoda Haas was born in 1924 to Walter A. Haas and Elise Haas.
Elise’s maiden name was Stern. Elise’s father, Sigmund Stern, was one of four nephews who inherited ownership of… Levi Strauss from their uncle… Levi Strauss .
Levi Strauss invented and patented his famous denim pants in 1873. When he died in 1902, at the age of 73, he left behind an estate valued at $30 million . That’s the same as around $900 million in today’s dollars. He was never married and had no kids. He left the majority of his wealth to various charities and orphanages. But Levi left his company, plus $6 million in working capital, to his four nephews. One of those nephews was Sigmund Stern.
Sigmund’s daughter Elise married Walter A. Haas. From that point on, descendants of this branch of the Haas family have controlled the majority of Levi Strauss.
Dan Goldman’s grandmother Rhoda received $1.3 billion when Levi Strauss was acquired through a leveraged buyout in 1996. If that sounds like a great outcome, it wasn’t. Rhoda vehemently opposed the buyout and actually died of a heart attack just as the deal was being finalized. Dan’s father died when he was young. His younger brother Bill died in a plane crash at the age of 38.
Dan got an undergraduate degree from Yale and then a law degree from Stanford. He spent a decade between 2007 and 2017 working as an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York, prosecuting securities fraud, mafia members, and various other white-collar offenses. Between 2017 and his election to Congress in 2022, he served as a Senior Advisor and Director of Investigations for the House Intelligence Committee. He also was an NBC and MSNBC legal analyst.
And in another weird twist, Dan wasn’t the only Levi Strauss heir named Dan to win an election on November 5.
Rhoda Haas had a brother named Peter Haas. In 1981, Peter married a recently divorced single mom named Mimi Lurie. When Peter died in 2005, he left his entire fortune to Mimi. Today, Mimi Haas owns 17% of Levi Strauss, which makes her the company’s largest individual shareholder. She’s worth $1.5 billion. Mimi’s son from her first marriage is named Daniel Lurie. On November 5, Daniel was elected to be the next mayor of San Francisco .
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San Francisco’s Next Mayor Is A Billionaire Heir Thanks To His Stepfather’s Great-Grand-Uncle-In-Law And… One Of America’s Best Inventions
ByBrian Warneron November 13, 2024inArticles›Billionaire News
Last week, a philanthropist named Daniel Lurie was elected to serve as the next mayor of San Francisco. Why are we talking about this on CelebrityNetWorth? Good question!
(Photo by Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Necessity Gives Birth
Daniel Lurie was born on February 4, 1977, in San Francisco. His father, Brian Lurie, is a rabbi. His mother Miriam Lurie (née Ruchwarger), goes by “Mimi.” Unfortunately, Brian and Mimi divorced when Daniel was just two years old. When he was four, Mimi remarried. Daniel’s new stepfather was a guy named Peter E. Haas.
Peter Haas was born in 1918, the son of Walter A. Haas and Elise Haas (née Stern). Walter’s father was a German immigrant who founded a grocery store called Hellman, Haas, and Company. Today, that grocery store is called Smart & Final. But this is not the invention/fortune we’re talking about today.
Peter’s mother, Elise, was the daughter of Sigmund Stern. Sigmund was the son of David and Fanny Stern (née Strauss). In the 1840s, Fanny and David operated a modest clothing and merchandise import company in San Francisco.
In the late 1840s, gold was discovered in Northern California. What we now call the “Gold Rush of 1849” inspired an estimated 300,000 people from all over the world to flock to California to seek their own gold fortunes. Miners became known as “49ers.” They toiled tirelessly for years in grueling conditions.
At the time, most work pants used by the average 49er were made out of canvas. Canvas could rip to shreds after a few days of mining so most 49ers took to laboring in their skivvies because their pants were so bad.
As the gold rush boomed, Fanny Stern’s brother moved out to San Francisco to work in the family business. He was intrigued by the obvious flaw created by canvas pants, so he got to work seeking a better alternative.
This budding entrepreneur’s goal was to create a pair of pants made of extremely durable fabric. Fabric that wouldn’t rip even under the most grueling gold mining conditions. The fabric he landed on was denim.
To make the pants extra reinforced, he added one more innovation: Circular metal rivets at various stress points, like the pocket corners.
The design was patented in 1873.
If you’ll recall from a moment ago, Fanny Stern was born Fanny Strauss. Fanny’s brother was named Levi. His patented invention was Levi Strauss denim jeans.
Levi Strauss
When Levi died on September 26, 1902, at the age of 73, he left behind an estate valued at $30 million . That’s the same as around $900 million in today’s dollars. He was never married and had no kids. He left the majority of his wealth to various charities and orphanages.
He left his company, plus $6 million in working capital, to his four nephews. One of those nephews was Sigmund Stern. In 1914, Sigmond’s daughter Elise married Walter A. Haas. For the next 100+ years, members of the Haas family have controlled and been enriched by Levi Strauss’s invention.
Walter A. Haas had three children. A daughter named Rhoda and two sons, Walter Jr. and Peter E. Haas . In 1981, Peter married a recently divorced single mom named Mimi Lurie. Peter died in 2005 at the age of 86. He left his entire fortune to Mimi.
The Haas family took Levi Strauss public in 1971. They took it private in 1985. In 2019, they took it public again . When Levi Strauss went public in 2019, roughly 200 Haas family members owned a collective 63% of the company. The largest individual shareholder, with a 17% stake, was… Mimi Haas. The widow of the great-grand-nephew of Levi.
Today, she owns around 11% of the company, which has a current market cap of just under $7 billion. That means today, Mimi Haas has a net worth of $1.5 billion .
The extended Haas family is worth a collective $5.5 billion , all thanks to a single invention patented by a man who, to many of them, would be their great-great-grandfather’s grand-uncle-in-law.
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