Blackmail narrative reinforces the need for dynastic advisors to weigh the cost of a reputational rescue when the heir gets in trouble.
Matt Gaetz has triggered significant outrage before, but it was always from a relatively insulated position. The politics don’t matter.
He’s a lawyer, a second-generation career politician and heir to a family fortune reportedly worth at least $25 million. That’s dynastic wealth. Manage it well, teach the kids to perpetuate the ethos and it should last for decades.
And when something goes wrong, the family resources are available to protect the kids and, if needed, the dynasty itself.
That’s the insulation that the children of wealthy families naturally enjoy. Even as we speak, a little of that money is now paying for ads arguing that Matt Gaetz didn’t really pay those women for shady reasons.
Some high-powered lawyers are also getting to bill for their time. Nothing wrong with that. This is what family money is for.
But Gaetz advisors have a real problem here. For one thing, blackmailers seem to have found Matt’s high media profile and sleazy habits an irresistible combination.
He makes a big, easy target with uncomfortable secrets to keep and the assets to buy people’s silence. Those secrets apparently drew his father into an elaborate extortion scenario of rogue FBI conspiracies, clandestine recordings and the entire family fortune on the line.
In theory, all it would have taken is $25 million to protect Matt’s career and reputation. That was apparently too big a demand.
The Hardest Choices
Paying the money might or might not have kept Matt’s sex allegations from hitting the public. Involving his father directly wasn’t a good move.
He built the Gaetz dynasty. He’s still actively involved in perpetuating his own legacy. Under normal circumstances, he’d be free to do that, leaving Matt to build his own life.
And unless the family is secretly worth a whole lot more than $25 million, asking them to pay literally everything to protect Matt bends the calculus too far.
Threatening to take the entire family fortune reduces the “dynasty” back to basic family scale. There’s no institutional agenda at that point: you spend the money to protect the moving human parts.
Sometimes you spend all the money and the people need to get back to work. But if all the people are in jail or otherwise out of commission, all that’s left behind is a pile of cash.
The people have to come first. That’s what the Gaetz family has evidently decided. They’re fighting to keep Matt afloat.
It means spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on public relations and lawyers. And it means participating in operations that look bizarre and desperate from the outside: secret meetings, counter-extortion traps, baroque schemes.
When the kids are on the line, you do what you can to get them out of it. If you fail or simply stop short of that point, a hole opens up in the succession that you then need to fill.
The Gaetzes are fighting. Other families would have let Matt go already.
Or there would have been tighter oversight and an intervention.
Where Was The Office?
However the facts settle, it’s clear that Matt was never really trained to really respect consequences. That’s a much bigger lesson for any would-be dynasty and its advisors.
If the kids never get into trouble, you never need to deploy assets to get them out.
And while a lot of kids, rich and poor alike, indulge in illegal, immoral or simply unsavory activities, most of them figure out how to keep it below the radar.
Frequent payments to young women on a digital platform qualifies, especially when you’re dealing with one that defaults to telling everyone in the network who you are, how much you’re paying and what (if anything) the rationale might be.
That’s what Venmo is. It’s the opposite of clandestine. When you’re a public figure, the transactions are more closely watched.
And if the feds could see who Matt was paying, a $25 million family office should have been able to watch the accounts as well.
Privacy is one thing, but I have to think the Gaetz family advisors were passively monitoring the accounts. Strange persistent debits would have flagged their tax compliance systems (is this an off-the-books business relationship?) as well as presented as possible fraud.
That’s the time to start defending your dynasty by teaching the heirs how to live their lives in a way that doesn’t generate quite so much risk.
Other families have stronger clandestine payment protocols. You give the kids access to relatively anonymous accounts and make sure the “public” settings are turned off.
And someone has a serious talk with the family principals about the dynastic code and how to enforce it. Matt did what he wanted and exposed his dad to what looks like serious extortion as well as embarrassment.
In some families, that’s okay. In others, the family office exists to provide financial discipline. And ultimately, kids who become a liability get squeezed out of the estate one way or another.
After all, while $25 million is a lot of money, it’s still one big mistake away from a trip back to the middle class. Whether Matt made that kind of mistake remains to be seen.
The fact that we’re talking about it at all is its own kind of failure. The family office should have caught this before the feds and taken all the legal steps required to make sure nobody else found out.
Blackmail is real. So is scandal. So is criminal liability. Smart families that want to turn into dynasties avoid these things.
The truly rich don't want or need strategies that help them turn a risk-free 3% return on their money into 3.5%. They want defense. And that's what they'll pay to get.
