The Lords and Ladies of M&Ms
The most powerful family dynasty in Washington, D.C., especially on Halloween.
Who is the most powerful family in the nation’s capital? If you guessed the Kennedys, or the Bushes, or the Clintons, go to the back of the class. It’s the Marses. The Mars family, owners of the privately held company that, with Hershey Co., sells most of the candy in the United States and an even larger proportion of the chocolate, are the third-richest family in America, after the (much-better-known) Waltons and Kochs. If you’ve never heard of them, that’s because they like it that way. They live in the suburbs of the fishbowl that is Washington, D.C. (Mars Inc. is headquartered in McLean, Virginia), but they shun the press; they’re unbelievable cheapskates who seldom give to charity; they increased their wealth during the pandemic (according to Sen. Bernie Sanders) by $32.6 billion; and they don’t especially care what you think of them raising the price for Starburst and Skittles 35 percent and 32 percent, respectively, during the past year. Let ‘em eat Godiva!
The Marses are the poster children for Thomas Piketty’s famous hypothesis that r > g, where r is return on capital and g is economic growth. Between 1983 and 2020 their net worth increased by 3,517 percent, and that’s corrected for inflation. During that same period, GDP increased only 179 percent. In anticipation of the Halloween holiday I wrote about them in The New Republic. You can read the piece here.