The acrimony grew in billionaire Ken Evenstad's family slowly, then ripped the family apart in the last years of his life.
Evenstad, who died in late 2020, made a fortune by driving a small Minneapolis drug company in the 1970s into the then-nascent market for generic drugs. The firm — Upsher-Smith Laboratories, now in Maple Grove — became a significant player in generics and developed dozens of its own drugs.
But as he battled pulmonary disease in his final years, Evenstad also struggled to separate the family from Upsher-Smith — which had no other shareholders except himself, his wife Grace, their daughter Serene and son Mark.
