As the hundreds of guests drank champagne and danced with stilt walkers gliding through the crowd, you could be forgiven for thinking it could be a wedding thrown by the Beckhams. Along with the two bands and five singers, there was a basketball hoop, video games and even a mini ice hockey rink to keep the guests entertained. But this was a celebration out of David and Victoria’s price range.
At a reputed cost of $2 million, the party was not even a wedding, but a Bar Mitzvah thrown in New York’s Pierre hotel by Nelson Peltz, the billionaire US investor, for his twins Zachary and Gregory. And that was way back in 2016. When it came to the wedding six years later of their more famous child, Nicola, to Brooklyn Beckham, Peltz and his wife Claudia decided to spend some real money.
At their oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Florida, they splashed out at least $3 million. And, unlike the Beckhams’ $1.5 million nuptials in 1999, it was not largely funded by Hello! magazine. “What can I say? Nelson loves his kids,” says one long-term associate.
Whatever went on at Nicola and Brooklyn’s wedding — with allegations of Victoria’s dirty dancing, claims and counterclaims over why she didn’t make the bridal dress — the Peltzes’ vast expenditure highlights something few in the UK seem to realize. As the Beckhams’ biographer and critic Tom Bower puts it: “People in Britain think the Beckhams are rich, but by the standards of the Palm Beach aristocracy, they’re nothing. David and Victoria didn’t get it either. They thought their celebrity status would be their passport to importance, but in Palm Beach, where billionaires are hanging out of every Rolls-Royce, the Brits really don’t matter.”
The Sunday Times Rich List last year put the Beckhams’ wealth at $660 million — mostly tied up in their private businesses. The Peltzes, according to Fortune magazine, are worth some $1.6 billion. Their Florida estate, close to President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, is worth $76 million. They own a 27-bedroom mansion near New York with 135 acres and its own ice hockey rink. The decor is not to everyone’s taste. One visitor sniffs: “Nice if you like Louis XIV, but perhaps Versailles should be kept in Versailles.” So, who are the Peltzes, and how did they get to be so extraordinarily rich?
“What can I say? Nelson loves his kids.”
Their fortune was created entirely by Nelson, who, despite his 83 years, is still one of Wall Street’s most successful, feared and ruthless financiers. In the City of London, he is famed for an attack on the consumer goods giant Unilever, which owns Dove soap, and has laid siege to US corporations from Heinz and the multi-national snack company Mondelez to Disney and Procter & Gamble, which is behind household brands such as Pampers and Gillette. Only last month, he led a $7.4 billion takeover of the British pension fund manager Janus Henderson.
Famously aggressive in the boardroom, Peltz has been described by one director on the receiving end of his attacks as “an old bully. Just like Trump”. Others said that, also like Trump (for whom Peltz has run election fundraisers), he can be funny and charming, too.
Born to upper-middle-class parents in Brooklyn, his father ran a food business, which funded his private school fees and the family’s later move to Manhattan’s upmarket Park Avenue. He got into the exclusive Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania but dropped out, joining the family firm instead.
He and his brother Robert took over and Nelson steered the firm through a series of ambitious takeovers, floating it on the stock market in 1972. Peltz partied hard through the 1970s and Eighties, throwing wild shindigs in his summer house on Long Island and hiring a press agent to field calls from the gossip columnists. There was even talk of him hosting “topless tennis” with female partygoers — a rumor that he did not quite deny in a recent interview in the Financial Times.
In the 1980s he started making really serious money. With so-called “junk bond king” Michael Milken, he pioneered using huge amounts of debt to buy companies. The pair worked hand in glove in the “greed is good” Wall Street of the 1980s. Milken went to jail in 1991, serving 22 months for securities fraud and tax felonies.
That was far from the only controversy in Peltz’s business life. In the early Noughties, long before their crimes became public, he teamed up with a consortium including the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and rapist Harvey Weinstein in an unsuccessful attempt to buy New York magazine. They were not, his camp insists, friends.
Bullying allegations have dogged the family over the years. Two former drivers sued Peltz in the 2000s for wrongful dismissal, while newspapers once claimed that Nicola bullied her Brazilian nanny when she was a girl — allegations vehemently denied by the nanny’s family and the Peltzes’ long-serving butler. The planners for Nicola and Brooklyn’s wedding sued Nelson after he fired them, claiming in court filings that he was a “billionaire bully”.
“People in Britain think the Beckhams are rich, but by the standards of the Palm Beach aristocracy, they’re nothing.”
Peltz’s third wife, former model Claudia Heffner Peltz, 70, is very much the matriarch of the clan, having given Nelson eight children, adding to the two he had with his second wife.
Nicola Peltz Beckham is an aspiring actress, having appeared in a number of films, culminating in 2024’s Lola, which she directed and starred in as a drug-addicted stripper. It was panned by critics as “poverty porn”.
She has 3.4 million followers on Instagram, where she describes herself as “Actor, writer, director, dog activist.” Factoring in Brooklyn’s 17 million followers, the publicist Mark Borkowski argues, the couple could create new fashion or cosmetics brands to rival those of Brooklyn’s middle-aged parents. This could, Borkowski says, be a reason for them to want to own the trademark for his name.
Nicola’s brother Will, 39, is also an actor and the pair are close, with matching tattoos of the word “family” in Hebrew. Will went into film and television after playing ice hockey in his youth. Their sister Brittany Peltz Buerstedde, 36, trained as a figure skater with Olympic coaches before injuries forced her to quit at 15. She married a corporate financier and is now being described as a “wellness guru”.
Nelson has encouraged some of his children to work in his business, Trian Partners, which he co-founded with the husband of Brooke, his daughter by his previous marriage. “It’s very much a family affair,” said one executive who had dealings with Trian. “You go for meetings at his home in Florida and he brings them all out to meet you. It’s like: here’s my son, here’s my daughter. It was odd.”
His Yale-educated son, Matt, 41, worked for Goldman Sachs before joining the family firm, rising to be partner. He now works for a subsidiary specializing in smaller companies. Diesel, 31, also worked in the firm although is now said to be mostly interested in tech companies. Neither are expected to take over the business. One board member in a multi-billion-dollar company under siege by Trian recalled how Nelson would bring Diesel into high-level meetings. “The kid was, like, twentysomething. It was: ‘What’s he doing here?’”
Nicola frequently posts doting photographs of her father on social media, declaring her love for him. He comes across in her feed as a kindly old man, sorting out his favorite cookies, or being snapped surrounded by his family in the garden.
There was talk of Nelson hosting “topless tennis” with female partygoers — a rumor that he did not quite deny.
It is unrecognizable to those who’ve been on the receiving end of Peltz’s fire in business. His technique, honed over decades, is to spot major companies that have become flabby or underperforming, buy a stake, then demand a place on the board and force change. In theory, this drives up the share price, handing him a healthy profit.
For the bosses he’s targeting, it can be bruising. One said: “He’s too domineering. Board meetings work when everyone gets their point across and you get a proper discussion. But even before the chairman could say his piece at the beginning of the meeting, Nelson would take the floor and talk for 10 to 15 minutes about what he thought should happen. He takes all the airtime and all the oxygen out of the room.”
Others find him refreshing and shrewd. Jean-François van Boxmeer, the chair of Magnum Ice Cream and Vodafone, who was on the board of Mondelez when Peltz launched his attack, said: “He is a strong character, to be sure. Never try to bullshit him. But he’s always incredibly well prepared and always comes with valid points.”
Peltz’s supporters say that, these days, he is more of a business operator than a plain corporate raider and financier. Van Boxmeer said: “He understands how businesses work; how you have to invest in brands and give responsibility to local managers.” But he is also a ruthless cost cutter. One corporate adviser to Trian said the coffee mugs there are emblazoned on one side with the words “Sales up, expenses down” and on the other “Cash is king.”
It is an image Peltz’s camp has been trying to push for years; the business genius rather than the junk bond-fueled financier. But he remains something of an outsider in the corporate world. The very top table of American business still views him as a disruptive raider rather than a true business builder. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan and an undisputed king of corporate America, came out against him in his (unsuccessful) attempt to muscle onto the board of Disney and Nelson eventually had to admit defeat.
Peltz’s craving for respect, like Nicola’s desire for fame, is not easily bought. Perhaps the spectacle surrounding Brooklyn’s outburst will bring her the celebrity she craves.
Jim Armitage is a contributing editor at The Sunday Times of London