[temphn]

  The twins' father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the 
  mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-
  shirt, drinking his morning rum ... He'd been full of 
  dangerous mischief since he was a child. As a 13-year-old 
  orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker – 
  then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish 
  14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for 
  property or propriety

That single word "orphan" is the most important part of this article. The reason this piece is so bizarre is that the sorts of traits that allow you to build great fortunes in business[1] are anti-correlated with those that result in becoming a tattooed, drunk, abusive, morbidly obese, criminally-inclined drug addict. Put another way, the kind of guy who would build up a fortune like that would be unlikely to have a biological son like this. In America we're supposed to pretend that DNA doesn't matter, and that you can only pass down looks/height and not brains/behavior, but reality doesn't work like that [2,3,4]. Babies put up for adoption at birth in particular tend to disproportionately be children of parents with low impulse control and mental disorders, and at least some of that appears to be due to the genetics of the parents above and beyond the orphanage conditions [5]. Sounds harsh, but good to know if you're considering adopting.

[1] Celebrities and athletes are of course excluded from this sentence. They don't become wealthy through scaling businesses/managing people, and as such have a much higher incidence of behavioral issues. Many NBA and NFL athletes are bankrupt after a few years out of the league, in fact.

[2] http://www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf

[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...

[4] http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/kalthoff/bio346/PDF/PowerPo...

[5] http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1737667,00.ht...

  The Minnesota psychologist and her colleagues found that 
  disparity could be due as often to innate factors such as 
  perinatal care or his birth parents' genes. "The 
  deleterious effects may quite possibly have come before the 
  adoption ever took place," Keyes, the study's lead 
  researcher, says.

[azernik]

Did you read any of the bits in between your ellipses?

  ...stinking rich from three trust funds: one from his
  father, Walker Inman Sr., heir to an Atlanta cotton
  fortune and stepson to American Tobacco Company founder
  "Buck" Duke; one from his mother, Georgia Fagan; the third
  from his grandmother, Buck's widow Nanaline Duke, who left
  the bulk of her $45 million estate to her little grandson.

The money involved was made by people with the same genes as Walter Inman, Jr.

[wavefunction]

And his father also died from "consumption" or "getting too fucked up too often" disease.

I've had some exposure to the "very wealthy" and they're just as fucked up at a rate as someone you might find in the trailer park tradition. It's often a factor of luck.

[Amadou]

Consumption is a synonym for tuberculosis, nothing else.

[temphn]

You know what, looks like you're right on this one and I am wrong. It wasn't clear on a first read whether they were saying "his father" as in "his biological father" or "his adoptive father", but on a second read you're right. I still think the statements hold in their generality but clearly not in this specific case.

[GuiA]

The excerpt you cite is from the first 5% of the article. Have you read the whole thing? There is more than enough evidence in this piece to show that nurture was very much a factor here, regardless of whether nature was or not.

[hollerith]

>That single word "orphan" is the most important part of this article.

Are you sure you are not conflating the concepts "orphan" and "adopted"?

[bendoernberg]

Both tattoos and obesity are inextricably tied in with social class; as a general rule, the very wealthy are far less likely to become obese or get tattoos, for a variety of reasons. That leaves "drunk" and "drug addict"; what's your basis for claiming that the children of wealthy businessmen are unlikely to have substance abuse problems?