"Passing money on is the simplest thing to do in the world: All you have to do is die," New York real-estate developer Kent Swig told Insider. "The hard part is passing money on from one generation to the next and having the company succeed." Swig, 60, is the grandson of the real-estate scion Benjamin Swig, who started building his property empire in 1936. After his father, Melvin, died in 1995, Swig, his three siblings, and cousins, who grew up together in San Francisco, ran the board of the Swig Company.