The Rise of the Neo Family Office

How Self-Custody Bitcoiners Are Reclaiming Financial Sovereignty

The guy’s name was something like Dave, and he lived in a beige-colored house on a street where every other house was also beige.

He had a perfectly fine but boring job. The interesting thing about Dave wasn’t his job, or his house, or his overgrown lawn. The interesting thing was happening in his garage, right next to a stack of vinyl and a pile of old National Geographic magazines.

There, on a metal workbench, sat a small, plastic device that looked like a USB stick from the early 2000s. To this device, Dave was performing a ritual. He wrote down a list of twelve random words: ocean, whisper, gravity, atlas… onto a sheet of paper. Then he stamped those same words onto a small plate of titanium, using a five-pound hammer and a set of steel letter punches. He was careful, methodical, like a watchmaker assembling a Swiss movement. The whole process took him nearly two hours. When he was done, he had secured a sum of money that, on paper, made him wealthier than his entire beige-colored neighborhood combined.

And he had done it without a single banker, a single lawyer, or a single pinstriped suit from Wall Street.

Dave had just founded his own family office, too.

He just didn't call it that.

Hopefully Dave reads this and starts thinking bigger with the fortune he’s earned. We are leaving the old economy, and their intermediaries, completely behind.

Fiat and Bitcoin (digital assets in general, but Bitcoin is king) are on different trajectories. They have different destinies thanks to the structure of each of them, and the terrible decision making by Central Bankers and Politicians. Because of this, fiat world will see slower growth rates. Fewer opportunities. And the constant wealth drag from the money printer.

The Problem with People Who Touch Your Money

To understand what Dave was really doing, you have to go back to a guy who had the opposite of Dave’s problem.

His name was John D. Rockefeller, and his problem wasn’t that he needed to make money.

John’s problem was that he had so much of it, it was becoming a physical nuisance, like a mountain of sugar attracting all the ants in the world.

The ants, in this case, were the bankers.

In the early 20th century, if you were ludicrously rich, you gave your money to a bank. That’s just what you did. But Rockefeller, a man whose paranoia was as vast as his fortune, looked at the bankers and saw a fatal flaw in their design. Their job wasn't to preserve his family's wealth for the next hundred years. Their job was to make money for the bank this year. They were playing a different game. They’d churn his portfolio for fees, leverage his assets for their own bets, and whisper sweet nothings about the latest hot railroad stock that their own trading desk was probably shorting. Their interests were not his interests.

So, in 1882, Rockefeller did something quietly radical. He pulled his money out and created a private company whose only client was him.

He hired the smartest people he could find, and he gave them a single, glorious mandate: make sure the Rockefellers stay Rockefellers.

It wasn't an investment fund, it was a fortress. They called it “The Room” and you can only imagine the discussions and information it contained. Its primary purpose wasn't even wealth creation. It was wealth preservation. It was a bespoke financial machine designed to protect a fortune from the two things that kill all great fortunes: bad decisions and the slow, grinding fees of other people who touch your money.

We’ve looked at the history of the family office concept over the generations, but the Rockefellers were the creators of what we call a family office today.

Check out any of these articles (use the search function) to dive deeper.

The System is the Fee

Fast forward 140 years.

The world is now drowning in people who want to touch your money. But the game has changed. The problem is no longer just a few bankers with misaligned incentives. The entire global financial system has become one giant, wealth-siphoning machine.

It’s run by people in nice suits who use words like “quantitative easing” and “inflation targeting.” They’ll tell you, with a straight face, that their goal is to make your money worth two percent less next year than it is today. They call this “price stability.” If you stored your life savings under your mattress, you’d be a fool. But if you put it in their bank, where they can guarantee it will lose value, you’re a responsible citizen.

The whole thing is a magic trick to put it kindly, and a mind fuck organized theft of all economic energy through intentional inflation, to speak bluntly.

You work your whole life to fill a bucket with water, and they stand over it with a sign that says, “For your own good, we will be drilling a small hole in the bottom of this bucket.”

This is the world Dave lives in. It’s the world you live in.

He sells his software, he pays his taxes, he saves his money. And every year, he feels like he’s spinning in place on the bike in his garage, putting in all the effort, but somehow ending up in the same place. His savings account is a melting ice cube. The stock market feels like a casino rigged in favor of the house. He’s playing the game, but he’s realized the game itself is the fee.

On paper his house’s value is flying through the roof (which is leaking by the way) but every lawn has a For Sale sign on it. And no one is buying.

Then one day he stumbles upon Bitcoin. At first, it seems like a joke. Internet money? But he’s a software guy, so he reads the white paper. And then he reads it again. And what he sees isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. He sees a system. A system with no CEO, no headquarters, and a monetary policy that was set in stone a decade ago and can’t be changed by some committee in Washington. A system where there are only ever going to be 21 million units, full stop.

And that’s when he has the Rockefeller moment.

He realizes that the only way to win is to not play their game. The only way to protect his wealth is to take it completely outside their system.

The New Family Charter

Which brings us back to Dave in his garage, hammering twelve words into a plate of titanium. Those twelve words are the keys to his Bitcoin. They are his vault. Without them, no one in the world can touch his money. Not a banker, not a regulator, not a hacker.

He has, in effect, created his own family office. A Neo Family Office.

The Chief Investment Officer: Dave.

The Board of Directors: Dave.

The Beneficiary: Dave’s family. Not the middlemen.

The Investment Charter: The Bitcoin protocol. Its rules are transparent and its supply is inviolable. The mandate is simple: preserve purchasing power against the guaranteed debasement of everything else.

The Vault: That little plastic device and the titanium plate buried somewhere no one will ever find it. It’s more secure than any bank vault on Earth, because its security doesn’t rely on thick steel doors, but on the unbreakable laws of mathematics.

Dave isn’t trying to beat the market.

He’s trying to leave the market. They printed too much money. The fiat system has made it’s bed and no amount of “financial bazookas” are going to blast their way to solvency.

Seeing all of this, Dave has fired the bankers, the fund managers, and the central planners. He has opted out of the system of slow-bleed fees and institutionalized inflation. He has built a small, sovereign fortress for his family’s future, using nothing but a consumer electronic device and a five-pound hammer.

And there are thousands of Daves out there, in thousands of garages, all performing the same quiet, radical ritual. Soon to be millions.

Then billions.

They’re not the characters you’d expect to be starting a financial revolution. But then again, John D. Rockefeller wasn't a banker. He was just a guy who had a problem, and was smart enough to figure out that the only person he could truly trust to solve it was himself.

Friends: in addition to the 17% discount for becoming annual paid members, we are excited to announce an additional 10% discount when paying with Bitcoin. Reach out to me, these discounts stack on top of each other!

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I started Wealth Systems in 2023 to share the systems, technology, and mindsets that I encountered on Wall Street. I am a Wall St banker became ₿itcoin nerd, ML engineer & family office investor.

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