[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.