While Anderson Cooper's son has only just celebrated his first birth, the journalist already knows what kind of inheritance he'll be leaving his little boy.
In the CNN anchor's own words, it won't be a "pot of gold." During an interview on Air Mail's podcast, Morning Meeting, Cooper weighed in on the subject while sharing his experiences and outlook on money as heiress Gloria Vanderbilt's son. In April 2020, Anderson announced the birth of his baby boy Wyatt Morgan Cooper, who he parents with help from ex Benjamin Maisani.
"I don't believe in passing on huge amounts of money. I don't know what I'll have. I'm not that interested in money, but I don't intend to have some sort of pot of gold for my son," he said. "I'll go with what my parents said, which is, 'College will be paid for, and then you gotta get on it.'"
Anderson explained that because of his famous family's money troubles, he never expected to inherit a fortune either. "I grew up watching money being lost and knowing it was being lost," he said. "From a very young age, I was very aware of, 'This is not me. This is something my mom has' or 'This is money my mom has, but it's not money I'm going to have and I need to forge my own way.'"
It's a perspective he's maintained for years. "I don't believe in inheriting money, " he told Howard Stern in 2014. "My mom's made it clear to me that there's no trust fund. There's none of that...I think it's an initiative sucker."
Anderson—whose father Wyatt Cooper died in 1978 and brother Carter Cooper committed suicide in 1988—said he's been driven not by making money or success, but by a need to survive. "I set about a course of studying survival from the time I was a little kid," he said. "When your dad dies when you're 10 years old, the world becomes a very different place and a very scary place and I wanted to know that I could survive in that scary world on my own."
"I knew my mom didn't have a plan," he recalled. "I felt like the ship was sinking and I wanted to know that I would be able to survive."