She started out at a small firm in lower Manhattan, working as a receptionist and studying at night to become a financial planner. Once she was certified, she signed up clients who wanted to “align their wealth with their values.” Her new role obligated her to master a shifting vocabulary of noblesse oblige. “They keep changing the name,” she said. “It went from ‘socially responsible investing’ to ‘E.S.G.’ ”—environmental, social, and governance. “Now it’s what we call ‘impact investing.’ ” What firms like hers offered was not charity; it was capitalism with progressive characteristics. “We would work out tax-efficient strategies to move clients out of legacy positions and into a new portfolio that was more simpatico with their conscience,” she said. For clients who had investments in “offender industries,” such as fossil fuels or private prisons, she could help them sell the stock and plant trees in the Amazon, structuring the trades to minimize the cost in taxes.

In the spring of 2013, a lawyer told her about a potential client who might benefit from Sonn’s expertise: a young woman in line to inherit part of an iconic American fortune. The lawyer was cagey about specifics, but eventually identified the prospect as Kendalle P. Getty, a granddaughter of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. In the nineteen-fifties, Getty was declared the richest living American. …

For nearly eight years, Sonn served the Getty sisters as an adviser and a confidante, until the relationship underwent a spectacular rupture. In a lawsuit filed last March, Kendalle’s lawyers accused Sonn of “unjust enrichment,” saying that she “coerced” her client into promising a bonus worth millions of dollars. In a countersuit, Sonn accused the Gettys and their advisers of retaliating for her opposition to a “dubious tax avoidance scheme” that could save them as much as $300 million. Robert Leberman, the administrator of the trust, and one of the defendants in Sonn’s suit, denied her allegations against the family. In a statement, he said that Sonn’s firing had been “non-retaliatory and warranted,” and that the suit was a “sad example of overreaching by someone now seeking to take advantage of a position of trust.”

[This is a fascinating look at how the rich stay rich, and how the fabulously rich never go broke at all — even if they go woke. “Broke” in the Getty sense is much different than for you and me. — Ed]