On 29 April 2026, a 74-year-old man quietly stopped being a member of the House of Lords, and the seat his family bought 110 years earlier went with him. The Astor name is still on a Manhattan hotel, a global luxury brand, a New York theatre and an entire neighborhood in Queens, and almost none of it earns a penny for anyone actually called Astor. The living ones are scattered across Oxfordshire, a Scottish island and a town outside Burlington, Vermont, and one of them sold a children's cartoon company for $195 million. The Astor fortune did not collapse, and that is the part most people get wrong.

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