Two Minnesota books inspired this post. First, I just interviewed Lina Patton, author of the very fun novel The Lake Club, a beachy read that takes place in the Twin Cities’ wealthy western suburbs and includes a fictional member of the Cargill family. Plus, I just reviewed former Minnesota Governor and U.S. Senator Mark Dayton’s new memoir for Racket. In Perseverance, Dayton writes candidly about his privileged upbringing. Both stories got me thinking, what are all the other ultra-rich Minnesotans doing with their moola?
Dayton
The Dayton family fortune has its origins in a dry goods store founded by George Draper Dayton in downtown Minneapolis in the early 1900s. That humble retail outlet became the fancy department store chain known as Dayton’s. The Dayton Company built shopping malls, expanded throughout the Upper Midwest, went public, and started Target.
Mark Dayton made his money make money by starting the Vermilion Investment Company. Read my Racket review (or the entire book!) to find out more about how Dayton leveraged his wealth and influence to make Minnesota better for everyone.
Mortenson
Founded in 1954, Mortenson Construction builds behemoths, like the U.S. Bank Stadium, where the Vikings play. Once you start noticing Mortenson-branded Jersey barriers at construction sites, you can’t stop seeing them. Beyond sports stadiums, the company builds hospitals, banks, and was recently linked to a 1.8-million-square-foot data center project in Hermantown, MN, projected to use 50,000 gallons of water per day (“equivalent to the daily use of about 160 homes” according to a March 4 Star Tribune article).
Kate Mortenson, who’s married to CEO David Mortenson, used her fortune to run as a Democrat (but to the right of the already moderate Ward 13 incumbent) for Minneapolis City Council in 2023. She lost. The Mortensons recently sold a 7,000-square foot home in southwest Minneapolis for $1,925,000.
David Mortenson is also Chairman of Vermilion Group, which invests in other businesses. Totally separate from Mark Dayton’s Vermilion Investment Company! Why the similar names? Do these guys lack creativity? Really like the color red? It’s weird, right?
Pillsbury
Flour mills in the 1800s earned the Pillsbury family its fortune. The good guys! As their family history The Pillsburys of Minnesota by Lori Sturdevant would have you believe. Charlie Pillsbury palled around with Mark Dayton at Vietnam War-era protests. The Pillsbury company eventually merged with General Mills, and in 2021, five members of the Pillsbury family—Charlie included—called for a boycott of General Mills products to protest the company’s decision to build a factory on Palestinian land seized by Israel.
Cargill
Among the largest privately held companies in the United States, Cargill is primarily an agribusiness and commodity trading company with a circle-of-late-capitalism-hell list of alleged offenses:
union busting
price fixing
animal abuse
toxic spills
deforestation
child slave labor
Most Cargills keep a low profile, with the exception of Kathy Cargill, who married into the agri-money. She made obnoxious on-the-record pronouncements about her Park Point real estate grab in 2024, coined a scatological idiom about breakfast cereal, then sold half of her plots on Duluth’s sinking peninsula in 2025.
Taylor
This one’s not a generational wealth story, but I’m including Glen Taylor here because he’s the richest person in the North Star State and his decisions affect (or is it “effect?) us all. Taylor made his own fortune, founding the Taylor Corporation, a big printing company in North Mankato. He’s served as a Republican state senator, bought and sold basketball teams, and he’s owned the Minnesota Star Tribune since 2014. Lately, under his ownership, Star Tribune leaders have been making polarizing (or is it “polarazing”?) choices about the future of the newspaper, like laying off staff, trying to sell its print facility to data center developers, and outsourcing headline proofreading to, well, I don’t know what, but definitely not professional copyeditors.
Let me know - which Minnesotan legacy wealth families are missing here? I can add to the list! I’m also curious, if you had a pile of old money, what would you do with it? Buy a sports team? Build a library? Run for office? Print bad headlines?
If I had a pile of old money I'd build an indoor velodrome to support track cycling, and I'd name it the Williams-Casper velodrome after Bob Williams (a great advocate of track racing at the old outdoor velodrome in Blaine) and Dan Casper (a former St. Paul firefighter and multiple world master track cycling champion).
I'd give The Loft or the University of Minnesota an endowment to support the development and publication of Minnesota & Midwestern fiction.
Minnesota has always had its share of uberrich, but not until this latest generation have so few of them invested in their home state or continued its philanthrophic traditions.