Daniel Craig doesn’t plan on leaving his multi-million dollar fortune to his children, revealing he finds the the idea of inheritance to be “quite distasteful”.
In an interview published this week in Candis magazine, the James Bond star said he would rather “get rid” of his money before he dies, and revealed his philosophy stems from the old adage “if you die rich, you’ve failed”.
“I don’t want to leave great sums to the next generation,” he said. “I think inheritance is quite distasteful. My philosophy is: get rid of it or give it away before you go.”
Craig, worth an estimated £116 million ($AU220 million), is father to Ella, 20, from is first marriage to actress Fiona Loudon, and a two-year-old with his second wife, Rachel Weisz. Weisz also has a 15-year-old son, Henry, with the film director Darren Aronofsky.
The Bond star’s thoughts are in line with a slew of other celebrities who have declared they don’t want to leave their children vast sums of money over fears it would render them lazy and incapable of getting a job and standing on their own two feet.
Kitchen Goddess Nigella Lawson once told My Weekly that she believes inheriting financial security “ruins people” and that she wants her children, daughter Cosima and son Bruno, to have to work for a living.
Likewise, talent show judge Simon Cowell has revealed his son Eric, 7, won’t see a cent of his estimated £430 million fortune.
“I’m going to leave my money to somebody. A charity, probably – kids and dogs. I don’t believe in passing on from one generation to another,” he said in an interview with Esquire.
While omitting children from a will seems to be in vogue among the world’s wealthy and elite, the same cannot be said for the rest of the world’s population. Indeed, Starts at 60’s own Big Survey revealed that attitudes were divided when it comes to Australian Baby Boomers leaving money to their children.
Of those surveyed, 33.9 per cent said they planned to leave an inheritance for their children, while 31.4 per cent were neutral on the idea. Only 11.4 per cent said they would definitely leave their wealth to their kids, while 8.1 per cent said they strongly disagreed with the idea of passing down their money to the next generation.
Data published in 2019 revealed that Australia is on the verge of its largest handover of wealth, with an estimated $3.5 trillion to be transferred from Boomers to younger Australians in the next 20 years.
The influx of cash is due to Boomers being born into one of the biggest economic booms in centuries. Affordable house prices, in comparison to wages, the rise of the sharemarket and the introduction of compulsory super in the latter half of their careers helped Boomers to accumulate more wealth than any generation before it. And now many Generation X’ers and Millennials are set to reap the rewards.