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Anderson Cooper is taking a piece of parenting advice from his late mother Gloria Vanderbilt.
On Saturday’s episode of Air Mail’s the Morning Meeting podcast, the news anchor announced that he has no intention of leaving his son Wyatt Morgan an inheritance when he dies, saying, “I don’t believe in passing on huge amounts of money. I don’t know what I’ll have.” He continued, “I’m not that interested in money, but I don’t intend to have some sort of pot of gold for my son. I’ll go with what my parents said…‘College will be paid for, and then you gotta get on it.’” Cooper previously revealed on an episode of The Howard Stern Show in 2014, that his mother—who died in June 2019 at age 95—had told him not to expect an inheritance. “My mom’s made clear to me that there’s no trust fund, there’s none of that,” he said. “I don’t believe in inheriting money…I think it’s a curse…From the time I was growing up, if I felt like there was some pot of gold waiting for me, I don’t know if I would have been so motivated.” However, according to probate documents obtained by Page Six, Cooper ultimately received a little under $1.5 million from his mother’s estate.
In his new book, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, the CNN host wrote about the history of his family and how they went from being some of the richest people on the planet to losing it all. Cooper told People that his son was a major inspiration behind the book, explaining, “in some ways, I wanted this to be a letter to my son.” He added, “My dad wrote a book before he died about his family growing up in Mississippi. And because he died when I was so young, a lot that I know of him came from that book. I wanted to write a letter to Wyatt about this crazy and unusual part of his family’s past.” Cooper’s father died during heart surgery when he was just 10 years old.
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