These folks have their hands in everything,there are 3 chapters to go after this one,each one dealing with a more current aspect of this family.Hardly a surprise to see them transition the way they do.

[....The power of the DuPonts is so extensive that it permeates most aspects of our daily lives.

If we buy high-test gasoline for our cars, we are helping to strengthen the DuPont empire. If our shirts are made of Dacron, or our frying pans of Teflon, we enrich the DuPonts. If our car is made by General Motors, or its tires by Uniroyal, we enrich the DuPonts. If we fly on a Boeing jetliner, buy Conoco or Crown gasoline, drink a Coke, eat a Chiquita banana, or sprinkle Domino sugar over our cereal, we have enriched the DuPonts . Our ties may well be made of DuPont rayon and colored with DuPont dyes. Our cars may be upholstered with Du Pont artificial leather and finished with DuPont lacquers. If we have an X ray taken at a hospital or buy see-through cellophane packages at the supermarket, spread fertilizer on our lawns or Lucite paint over our walls, take home-movies on vacation or fish with a nylon line or hunt with a Remington rifle, we may have just helped buy some DuPont his next $600 suit.

Although the Rockefeller, Morgan, and Mellon banking families probably control more corporate assets, the Du Ponts have more personal wealth. In fact, no family in America has been richer longer than the Du Ponts. They are the country’s oldest industrial family, producing gunpowder sixty-eight years before Rockefeller was identified with oil, eighty-six years before Carnegie with steel, ninety years before Ford with automobiles.

The Vanderbilts, it is often pointed out, survive as rich people; the DuPonts survive as a corporation. This may be changing now, but there is little doubt that the survival of the DuPont family as a cohesive body with a separate identity of its own has been the result of the unique role it played in American economic history as a company. It should be emphasized, however, that the company has not ruled the family, as is so commonly suggested; rather, the family has ruled the company. Throughout its history, the main concern of the family has always been the family, not the company. In fact, the main concern of DuPont Company was always the DuPont family. The family was never as obsessed with the company as it has been with itself. The family was the object of its own determination and, in the early years, sweat. The company was merely a tool, and once, in 1902, when the company was nearly given up, it was retained only in the family’s interest. And now, as we shall see, control may well be surrendered, again in the family’s interest. The DuPont family’s profit, it is clear, is its own motivation. On this, Delaware’s largest clan has built—and torn down—its greatest customs.

DuPont history, however, did not occur in a vacuum, divorced from the broader social and economic history in which it thrived. Probably the strongest force aiding DuPont’s rise was the State (polis)....]
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/04/part-11dupont-dynasty-behind-nylon.html