AMERICA: Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson's documentary Born Rich, which examines the lives of 10 of his young, wealthy friends, begins with a recollection of his own 21st birthday party, a magnificent bash with all the champagne and pretty girls he could have wished for.
"You wonder, can life get any better than this?" Johnson muses. "Well, to be blunt, it can. At midnight, I'm going to inherit more money than most people could earn or spend in a lifetime. I have been waiting for this moment for as long as I could remember."
Such happy moments may become rarer for the children of America's super-rich after this week's decision by Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man, to give most of his fortune away to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett gave smaller sums to charitable foundations run by his children but he said he decided long ago that his heirs were not going to inherit much for their personal use. "Our kids are great. But I would argue that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home - I would say it's neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money," he said.
Buffett is not the first American billionaire to give away his fortune.
Duty-free magnate Chuck Feeney started giving his money away in secret many years ago, much of it to educational projects in Ireland, Vietnam and Australia, and he plans to give away the rest before his death. Buffett's dramatic announcement this week, however, has sparked a debate in America about inherited wealth and prompted other plutocrats to promise to follow his example.
Within hours of Buffett's announcement, billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman was telling Fox News that he too would give all his wealth away and that his daughter would have to make her own way in the world.
Buffett's children have accepted their father's decision with good grace, thanking him for enabling them to run charitable projects of their own.
"I think that what he's done is that he's given us the kind of money that we can do a lot to help a lot of people in the world, and we can stay involved without having to manage a lot of other people," Howard Buffett said.
Despite their father's wealth, the Buffett children didn't enjoy much luxury as they grew up, receiving just 75c a week in pocket money.
Later, the investor turned down his daughter Susan's request for a $41,000 loan to improve her kitchen.
"I asked for a loan just to expand the kitchen so I could fit the highchair in when my daughter was born, and he said 'Go to the bank and do it like everyone else'," she said this week.
For most of the rich kids Johnson interviews, the prospect of not inheriting their family wealth is a nightmare almost beyond compare. S I Newhouse IV, who stands to inherit the Conde Nast publishing fortune, worth at least $20 billion, says he thinks about it constantly.
"I'm paranoid all the time that the next fax from my grandfather or the next phone call is going to be: 'I'm really disappointed with you because you wore the wrong pair of shoes the other day, so you're on your own. Have fun.'
"Scares the hell out of me," he said. Newhouse admits that he wouldn't trust himself with even $1 million right now and many of Johnson's friends seem equally unsure about what they want to do with their money.
At one stage, Johnson asks A & P supermarket heiress Juliet Hartford what she would do if she inherited everything immediately.
"Give it all to the homeless. No, kidding," she says, squealing with laughter.
"I'd just have a few houses - in the Bahamas and London. And animals. A plane. A big art studio, things like that." Johnson, whose father appears to have been made melancholy by wealth, concludes that the problem with inheritance is that nobody can really prepare you for it.
"There are no courses in college about how to be a hard-working, productive, rich person. It's something you have to work out for yourself," he says.