When billionaire Leona Helmsley died, she left $12 million to her dog, Trouble. She left $10 million each to two of her grandchildren and nothing to two other grandchildren. According to this fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine
Helmsley made only a handful of relatively small individual bequests in the will, and left the bulk of her remaining estate to the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. Based on the figures in court files, that trust may turn out to be worth nearly eight billion dollars, which would make it one of the top ten or so foundations in the United States. (Leona’s estate was so large because Harry left his fortune to her.) According to a “mission statement,” which Helmsley signed on March 1, 2004, the trust was to make expenditures for “purposes related to the provision of care for dogs.”
An $8 billion trust to care for dogs? Are we living in the Bizarro world? That is more than the GDP of Mauritania, Swaziland, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Somalia, Eritrea, Gambia and Liberia. For dogs???