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What It’s Like to Grow Up With More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend - The Cut
Abigail Disney, 59, is an activist and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. She is also the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, making her an heiress to the Disney family fortune (she declines to say how much she inherited, but has given away over $70 million since she turned 21). Raised in North Hollywood, California, with three siblings, she has a doctorate from Columbia and currently lives in New York. Here, she talks about the paradoxes of growing up in tremendous wealth; she will also be featured on the Cut’s podcast, The Cut on Tuesdays, on April 9.
Growing up, did you know you were wealthy?
At least when I was young, my parents weren’t really showy people. The money didn’t really change them until later. Actually, they were really proud of being humble people — an oxymoron, I know. They wanted to raise us with the sense that we weren’t any better than anyone else.
That said, we lived in a big enough house that we would always get two doorbells on Halloween — people would ring the front and the back thinking it was two houses. But again, it wasn’t lavish. There weren’t private airplanes and things like that until I got older.
Abigail Disney, 59, is an activist and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. She is also the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, making her an heiress to the Disney family fortune (she declines to say how much she inherited, but has given away over $70 million since she turned 21). Raised in North Hollywood, California, with three siblings, she has a doctorate from Columbia and currently lives in New York. Here, she talks about the paradoxes of growing up in tremendous wealth; she will also be featured on the Cut’s podcast, The Cut on Tuesdays, on April 9.
Growing up, did you know you were wealthy?
At least when I was young, my parents weren’t really showy people. The money didn’t really change them until later. Actually, they were really proud of being humble people — an oxymoron, I know. They wanted to raise us with the sense that we weren’t any better than anyone else.
That said, we lived in a big enough house that we would always get two doorbells on Halloween — people would ring the front and the back thinking it was two houses. But again, it wasn’t lavish. There weren’t private airplanes and things like that until I got older.