The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism

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Lately, Sam Jacobs has had a lot of conversations with his family's lawyers. He's trying to gain access to more of his $30 million trust fund. At 25, he's hit the age when many heirs can blow their money on harebrained businesses or a stable of sports cars. He doesn't want to do that, but by wealth management standards, his plan is just as bad. He wants to give it all away.'I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,' he said.A socialist since college, Jacobs sees his family's 'extreme, plutocratic wealth' as both a moral and economic failure. He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesMillennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in American history -- the Great Wealth Transfer, as finance types call it. Tens of trillions of dollars are expected to pass between generations in just the next decade.And that money, like all wealth in the United States, is extremely concentrated in the upper brackets. Jacobs, whose grandfather was a founder of Qualcomm, expects to receive up to $100 million over the course of his lifetime.Most of his fellow millennials, however, are receiving a rotten inheritance -- debt, dim job prospects and a figment of a social safety net. The youngest of them were 15 in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the have-a-lots and everyone else; the oldest, if they were lucky, were working in a post-recession economy even before the current recession. Class and inequality have been part of the political conversation for most of their adult lives.In their time, the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor has pushed left-wing politics back into the American political mainstream. President-