Sol Goldman built one of the largest privately held real-estate empires in New York — roughly 1,900 properties, including the land beneath some of the city’s poshest addresses, from the Gramercy Park Hotel to the Cartier Building on Fifth Avenue. Many of those ground leases, where tenants develop on Goldman land, run 99 years. When a lawyer once asked his daughter Jane whether she had any formal training in real estate, she answered: ‘Yes, the best.’ Asked what it was, she said: ‘Sol Goldman.’
Sol died when Jane was 32. He named her and her brother Allan co-executors of his estate, charged Jane with appointing a third, and left the four siblings equal stakes. Jane and Allan ran the business, consulting the other two on major decisions. And here is the line in the Journal’s account that ought to stop anyone with a family business, a rental property or simply children: much of the structure was informal, with a lack of documentation about transferring a company between generations. It was, after all, all in the family.
Why he left it that way
Not carelessness. Jane says it was deliberate: it was her father’s hope, and at the time the other family members’ hope, to keep it together for themselves and future generations. That is a genuinely warm reason. Writing down who decides what, in what order, with what recourse, feels like an accusation against people you love and trust. Formalizing it says out loud that someday they might disagree. Most families find that unbearable, so they do not do it.
Four decades later, Jane and her nephew Steven Gurney-Goldman agree on almost nothing. Not on who should manage the business or how. Not on the circumstances that led to the death of Steven’s father Allan, who died in a Russian hospital after being taken there for treatment. Not on whether a conversation in Jane’s Midtown office about four years ago was a request or a blackmail attempt. By 2024 she was in the witness stand of a Delaware courtroom. The Journal’s reporting includes a line worth writing on a card: the law is ill equipped to deal with the latent jealousy and hidden ambitions that lurk below the surface of inheritance.
The version that happens to everyone else
Almost nobody reading this has 1,900 buildings. Practically everybody reading this has the identical structural problem at a smaller scale, and the smaller scale does not make it milder. A house with no clear instruction. A brokerage account with a beneficiary designation last updated before a divorce. A parent who told one child something verbally and never told the others. A small business where one sibling has worked for twenty years and the others have not, and nothing says what that is worth.
The mechanism is always the same. The generation that built it understood the arrangement perfectly, because they lived it. They did not write it down because they trusted each other, and because writing it down was uncomfortable, and because there was always more time. Then the person who held the whole picture in their head died, and the picture died with them. What is left is a set of documents that do not match anyone’s memory of the intention, and children who each remember a different conversation — all of them honestly.
This is the rare planning topic where the work is not financial at all. Beneficiary designations override wills, and they are the single most common failure point in an otherwise tidy plan. Titling on a home decides more than a will does. And an hour spent saying the intention out loud to everyone at the same time is worth more than any document, because it removes the possibility that four people each remember a different private promise.
You do not wait for the first drop to find the umbrella. If nobody in your family has ever said the plan out loud, this is a fifteen-minute conversation with enormous leverage — and it costs nothing but the discomfort of admitting that people who love each other can still end up in Delaware. Bring the beneficiary pages; that is where we would start.