And if you felt like passing it down your family tree, the number of people would have multiplied by an order of magnitude, diluting the share each grandchild ends up with.

The richest woman alive [by far] is the grand daughter of L’Oréal founder. Bloomberg puts the family’s stake all in her name. The info bit also says French inheritance says 50% has to go to one person. So for at least a few generations, the majority of the wealth can remain consolidated.

That's a bit shocking about the French inheritance law. It must create awful family tensions when there are more than 2 children.

If I remember correctly the rules for minimum inheritance, it’s actually (n-1)/n of the inheritance has to be dedicated to the children, where ‘n’ is the number of children.

Each child is entitled to 1/n of that.

If I have 5 children, I have to give them 4/5 of the inheritance. Each one will have 1/5 of that 4/5.

And in the case of a sole child, she must receive 100% of 50% of the inheritance, at least.

OK. That makes more sense (except (n-1)/n=0 when n=1). In New Zealand too, you're required to give some inheritance to each of your children. There isn't a formula but lawyers seem to have observed that a minimum of about 10% each is acceptable.

In the U.S, it is ok to completely disinherit children. It has to be done so explicitly though.

You say that like it's a bad thing?

Dead people don't need money, and an inheritance is infinity% return on 0 investment.

Yep. Also, if I want to get pleasure from a bag of candies using my hard earned money, most people expect me to pay sales tax and candy shop taxes from profits and whatnot. But if I happen to want to get pleasure by giving the money away to my kids, I should absolutely not be taxed. Or to a charity, in which case I should not only not pay any taxes, but I should also be for some incomprehensible[1] reason be able to deduct the expenses in my taxation... Well, I guess nobody has promised that people should be logical in their preferences.

[1] Yes, yes I know. Charities are supposed to do some good. How, exactly, providing income to candy shop owner so that they can buy education for their kids is less good than your average tax avoidance charity scheme?

> deduct the expenses in my taxation

You don’t get to deduct the expenses from your taxation. You get to deduct the expenses from your taxable income.

That’s a big difference. You can’t make money on taxes by giving it away to charity (unless that charity is somehow fraudulently enriching you).