For the ultra-wealthy, car collecting has evolved from the showpiece classics of the Gatsby era to a passion for high-performance models meant to be driven. As Marcus Baram explores this week, today’s collectors are drawn to rare 1990s and early 2000s cars with bespoke interiors — vehicles that bring both speed and style to the road.
In an exclusive interview, legendary director Francis Ford Coppola shares with our reporter Andrew Cohen his philosophy on the relationship between personal wealth and the arts. Read on to learn about Coppola's latest release, “Megalopolis,” and the family legacy he hopes to leave behind.
As always, we appreciate any comments, ideas and insights that would make this newsletter more useful. I look forward to growing this family office community with your help. Please email me at [email protected].
HANDPICKED: How younger drivers are transforming collectible-car market
By MARCUS BARAM
For the ultra-wealthy, car collecting has long been an obsession going back to the Rolls-Royces and Pierce-Arrows of the Great Gatsby era. A century later, the fascination is as strong as ever — but with an increasing focus on performance cars that you actually drive, rather than just keep in a garage to show off to others.
And as younger generations mature and acquire wealth, they’re collecting the cars they coveted as teenagers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
At the end of August, Swiss car collector Fritz Burkard made waves when his Bugatti Type 59 — once owned by Belgium’s King Leopold — won the legendary Pebble Beach car show. Burkhard also raised eyebrows in his handling of the car.
“Whereas a lot of people were polishing their cars every day, he was driving around the Monterey Peninsula with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth,” said his good friend Ben Hedley, the CEO of London-based Hedley Studios, which creates junior reproductions of classic cars such as Bugatti, Ferrari, Aston Martin and Bentley.
Driven to drive ’em
Burkard’s approach reflects a growing trend among collectors who want to drive their cars and enjoy them, compared to the traditional collectors — dubbed “garage queens” by Chaz Lazarian, an Atlanta-based family office collector, because they keep them just for show in their garage.
Lazarian, who said he has “stopped counting” how many cars he has, likes to buy cars that he can flip — from Rolls-Royces and Bentleys to Aston Martins. “But while I have them, I like to use them, go out and drive them,” he said.
That trend aligns with the advent of wealthy millennial collectors, who are snapping up high-performance cars they coveted as teenagers.
“Instead of sitting around and admiring their cars, they’ll get their buddies and go on a 200-mile drive,” said Brian Rabold, vice president of automotive intelligence at Hagerty.
Hedley calls this the “bedroom wall scenario” for collectors “my age who grew up with pictures of a Lamborghini Countach on their walls, and now they have money to spend.” That explains why the peak in car prices tends to be about 30 years after they were released, he said.
Currently, cars from the 1970s and 1980s, which were snapped up by baby boomers and some Gen X collectors, are fading in value, reflecting that trend.
Quality over quantity
Younger collectors favor quality of quantity, said Rabold, noting that the average collection size for high-net-worth collectors ages 40 and younger is seven vehicles, compared with 15 for collectors ages 60-75, according to a survey conducted by Hagerty. Yet the average vehicle value for younger collectors is $327,000 versus $165,000 for older collectors.
In addition, the average model year owned is 1992 for younger collectors versus 1975 for older collectors.
Some of the standout cars that Rabold cites are a 1999 Lamborghini Diablo GT, which has almost tripled in price since 2014, and the 1990 BMW M3, which has skyrocketed from $29,900 in 2014 to $141,000 today.
Yet some of the recent hypercars that sell for more than $1 million have seen the reverse trend, dropping in value. That market is “swamped,” Hedley said.
“Everybody saw an opportunity, and they jumped at it. They all saw Ferrari selling these limited-edition cars for $1 million, $2 million, $5 million. But that was Ferrari. So a lot of other companies came in.”
Another emerging trend is “restomod” — older cars like a Porsche 911 restored with more powerful engines and bespoke interiors. Some collectors spend more than $1 million on services from companies like Los Angeles-based Singer Vehicle Design, which add features like carbon ceramic brakes and titanium sports exhaust.
Hedley said his firm adds a carbon-fiber tub to a classic Bentley, among other features. “What if that design had modern technology? What could they have done?” he said. “It’s fascinating, and we can do really interesting things to these classic cars.”
Talk before you sell
As with other wealthy collectors of art and jewelry, the next generation might not share the same passion as their elders. Rabold said Hagerty sees next-gen members of family offices who might inherit 30 collectible cars but only keep two or three.
“It can create problems because there’s a lot of knowledge tied up with the original collector, and it can make things more difficult for families to know where to start,” he said. Rabold’s advice is for collectors to “have those conversations upfront” with their heirs about how to handle their collection.
As for the future of the market, Hedley has hope, noting that a shipping container of original Tesla Roadsters ended up with the cars selling for a lot of money. Even several decades from now, when self-driving vehicles transport most of the population, “there are always plenty of people who love to drive.”
Coppola on wealth, legacy, and Hollywood’s decline
By ANDREW COHEN
Director Francis Ford Coppola has spent more than $100 million of his own fortune to make his new film, “Megalopolis.” As the 85-year-old looms over a film dynasty that spans five generations, he views his family’s creativity — not box office results — to be the crux of his family legacy.
“My kids, they are my real legacy. My children all know that the secret of making art is to make it personal,” Coppola told Crain Currency last week at the World Business Forum in New York. “You know a Sofia Coppola film even without knowing her name is on it. It doesn’t change my legacy. [Megalopolis] was a film I wanted to make, and the movie business has gotten more narrow recently.”
Best known for films such as “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now,” Coppola is the son of musician and composer Carmine Coppola and Italia Coppola, who published a cookbook in 2000 called Mama Coppola's Pasta Book and is the inspiration behind Coppola’s Mammarella Foods brand of Italian pasta and sauces.
Gia Coppola, whose “The Last Showgirl” recently won an award at the Sebastián Film Festival, represents the fifth generation of Coppolas in film. She is the granddaughter of Francis Coppola and the niece of Sofia Coppola, director of “Lost in Translation” and “The Virgin Suicides”.
The family traces its film roots back to Coppola’s grandfather, Agostino Coppola, who helped engineer the Vitaphone machine that gave sound to silent films in the 1920s.
Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, died in April at age 87 after she had been diagnosed with thymoma, a rare form of cancer. The two met while working on the set of Francis’ 1963 horror film “Dementia 13.” They had three children together — Sofia, Roman and Gian-Carlo, who all became filmmakers.
"When we were all together, we used to play,” Coppola recalled. “Every summer we would do creative camp; they would do one-act plays, and they would write songs. Everyone plays with their kids, but we used it as a way that they’d learn about the arts.”
From film to wine … to film
To help fund his latest film and other ventures, Coppola reportedly leveraged his wine business, securing a $200 million loan against his ownership stake in Delicato Family Wines. This move follows his 2021 merger of the Francis Ford Coppola Winery with Delicato, a deal valued at $650 million.
Coppola’s deep roots in winemaking, however, extend well beyond his recent ventures. He also owns Inglenook, a historic Napa Valley winery on his 1,500-acre estate, acquired in 1975 with earnings from “The Godfather” and “The Godfather, Part II.” Winemaking is a family legacy: His grandfather Agostino Coppola crafted wine during Prohibition in New York, using concrete vats he built in his apartment basement.
“My grandfather had seven sons. My uncles all used to steal the grapes they wanted the grapes, so it seemed like fun,” Coppola said. “When I had a little money, I decided to buy a summer house that had some grapes so we could make wine and have fun and give it for Christmas presents. It was always fun.”
While Coppola’s wine fortune helped finance “Megalopolis,” it is not the first self-funded film for the five-time Academy Award winner. He previously took out millions in loans and mortgaged his personal property to produce “Apocalypse Now” (released in 1979) and “One From the Heart” (1981). He had been trying to produce “Megalopolis” since the 1980s, but no studio committed to working on the film. So it went into development purgatory for decades until he financed it himself.
“What’s happening both to journalism tragically and the studio system is they’re both dying,” said Coppola, who founded his American Zoetrope film studio in 1969. “The people who run the movie business are only interested in one thing, which is to be able to make their debt payments. They’re not interested in making a film that has any risk, and any real art has risk.
“I wanted to make a film that had risk,” he said of Megalopolis, “so I took the risk.”
The star-studded cast of “Megalopolis” includes Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight, and Dustin Hoffman. The science fiction drama is set in an alternate 21st century New York City known as “New Rome,” as the film makes historical parallels to the political transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.
According to The New York Times, the film cost about $140 million to make. On its opening weekend Sept. 26-29, it brought in $4 million.
A flop is not an apocalypse
In the event of a box office flop from “Megalopolis,” Coppola has discussed a contingency plan for a “very useful” tax write-down. “I’m very old, so it all goes into an estate plan,” he told The Wall Street Journal in a story published last month.
“ ‘Apocalypse Now’ never stopped playing, so over time it made money. My films enjoy long life, and long life is another way to make money. I have no doubt that ‘Megalopolis’ is going to pay for itself; it’s just going to take 30 years to do it, which is OK. So really, I don’t think it has anything to do with my legacy.”
“What happened to Rome is happening to us,” Coppola said. “Roman senators were making so much money because Rome was such a successful conqueror that they were more interested in their own power and wealth than their job. Just like today, our senators are more interested in their own power. And then Rome lost its senate famously and ended up with an emperor — a king. And that could happen to us.”
In explaining his definition of wealth, the Hollywood icon referenced works from the 19th century English writer John Ruskin.
“Wealth is really the creation of poverty, because wealth only depends on you having something that someone else doesn’t have,” said Coppola. “That for every dollar you have in your pocket there’s gotta be someone who has a deficit of a dollar in their pocket. Or else you have no leverage over them — that’s what it's really about.”
LOOSE CHANGE
World Business Forum takeaways for family offices: Experts in talent management and leadership spoke at the recent World Business Forum in New York City, which Crain Currency attended to relay these takeaways for family office professionals.
Cresset promotes chief growth officer: The Chicago-based multi-family office has promoted Jessica Malkin to be its new chief growth officer and executive managing director. She will also continue to serve as chief marketing officer.
Eaglebrook exec on family offices and digital assets: To better understand this dynamic sector and how family offices can navigate it effectively, Crain Currency spoke with Kristen Mirabella, head of partnerships at Eaglebrook
Help us with a story: We’re working on a story about the art of family legacy storytelling. If you have any comments on the topic, reach out to [email protected].