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Happy or unhappy, each family generation often resembles another, and that is especially true when it comes to the Rothschilds.

More than 200 years after Mayer Amschel Rothschild founded the family dynasty that offered discreet counsel and investment wisdom to kings, queens, emperors and industrial titans, his 35-year-old direct descendant, Nathaniel, has emerged as a kingmaker in his own right and an investor who some say may become the richest Rothschild of them all.

In five short years, the man in line to be the fifth Baron Rothschild is close to becoming a billionaire through a web of private equity investments in Ukraine, Eastern Europe and most significant, his partnership stake in Atticus Capital, the fast-growing $14 billion hedge fund.

The ascent of Mr. Rothschild is a vivid illustration of how the still glittering, if somewhat faded, prestige and wealth of Europe's most storied banking family has been reinvigorated from bold bets in this era's new-money investment vehicles.

Like his forebears, he prefers that his influence remain unseen.

Mr. Rothschild is a principal adviser to Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest oligarchs in Russia and the owner of the aluminum giant Rusal, which recently merged with two other companies to create the world's largest aluminum company. Mr. Rothschild received no public credit despite having played a crucial role in getting the deal done.

And like a true Rothschild he has a taste for the good life: as an avid skier, his principal residence is in Klosters, Switzerland, and he uses his Gulfstream jet to shuttle among his other homes in Paris, Moscow, London, New York and Greece.

But he is also a man of contradictions: he dates supermodels and actresses, sits on an advisory board of the Brookings Institution, a research organization in Washington, and serves his guests the best wines from the Rothschild vineyards, which he himself will not drink.

He professes to have a penchant for privacy and would not be interviewed for this article, yet he allowed his lushly renovated town house in Greenwich Village to be featured in Men's Vogue magazine. Despite his reputation as the most gregarious of men and the increasingly public nature of his life and career, he comes across as a pinched, reticent man in the few public photographs of him -- as if he was shying away from his renown.

The burden of being a Rothschild can be a heavy one. In 1996, one of Mr. Rothschild's cousins, Amschel, having been asked to fill a leadership position in the family bank in London, hanged himself in a hotel bathroom at the age of 41.

Four years later Raphael de Rothschild, also a cousin, died on a sidewalk in Manhattan at the age of 23 from a heroin overdose.

In the early 1990s, some thought that Mr. Rothschild might also buckle under the weight of the family name. He appeared to be an aimless society playboy with a taste for the slack, unchallenged lifestyle so often embraced by the sons and daughters of Europe's rich families.

''This is the story of Prince Hal turning into Henry IV,'' said Charles G. Phillips, who supervised Mr. Rothschild during his time at the investment firm Gleacher & Company. ''He is one of the few sons of great men who has enhanced the family stature and created his own wealth.''

The family legacy was daunting at first for Mr. Rothschild, whose ancestor Nathan Mayer Rothschild helped finance Britain's victory at Waterloo and whose father, Jacob, split from the family bank in 1980 to begin his own successful career as an investor.

So much so that until he started work as a 25-year-old investment analyst at Gleacher in 1995, Mr. Rothschild avoided it altogether.

He was the life of parties in New York, Paris and London, and in 1995 he eloped to the Dominican Republic with Annabelle Neilson, a free-spirited London socialite with a reputation for dancing on dinner tables in her high heels.

In 1995, when Mr. Rothschild showed up for work at Gleacher, he was still trying to find his way. He was a recent graduate of Oxford, where he had been a member of the exclusive Bullingdon Club, a notorious drinking society known for its rite of wrecking the restaurant furnishings after raucous dinner parties.