After Mr. Forbes’s death in 1990, the magazine and family prospered for over a decade. Forbes had a strong stable of reporters, and in the early ’90s, it played a leading role in exposing Jordan Belfort, the crooked Long Island stockbroker depicted by Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

In the wake of the dot-com bust, the pressures of operating as a stand-alone magazine created enormous difficulties. During the first tech boom, companies like AOL and Yahoo spent money on full-page ads in Forbes in a bid for credibility and traction. A decade later, those companies are not clients but are vying instead for advertising dollars. Increased competition, along with readers fleeing print, has forced layoffs, constant changes in strategy and a partnership with Elevation that failed to alter the fundamental math.

After Mr. Forbes died, the family sold his cherished collection of Fabergé eggs, mothballed the yacht, peddled the jet and offloaded the company’s historic headquarters on lower Fifth Avenue. Now it has come down to selling the magazine itself, which, beginning next year, will be based in an office tower in Jersey City. There will be no more soaring helicopter rides over Manhattan.

Like so many other media dynasties — the Bancrofts, the Chandlers, et al. — the passage of time has been accompanied by operational challenges and falling profits that have tested family ties. The Forbeses are no exception. Steve Forbes spent close to $70 million running for president — twice — with little discernible impact beyond the resentments it created with family members.

The entire category of business magazines has been punished, but Businessweek and Fortune have the benefit of being part of larger, more diversified enterprises, while Forbes has had to go it alone. The magazine doubled down hard on a digital advertising strategy with a lot of click-bait headlines and opened its platform to thousands of contributors, improving traffic but diluting its brand. In the context of the current sale, some saw that strategy as more like lipstick on a pig, a bold effort that fails to hide the fundamental ugliness of the situation.

If the Forbes brand has been dented, it has hardly been destroyed. The name has always resonated globally, partly because the Forbes 400 “rich list” is fetishized by the wealthy, many of whom will be on the list of the world’s billionaires that comes out Monday. And the Forbes Asia summit remains a popular, profitable event.

In that context, a buyer from a nascent economy on the rise make sense. The Far East is a place that is not only making much of the world’s goods, the countries there are also manufacturing wealth at an astounding rate. Forbes might be a nice trophy for a foreign buyer as a way of signaling its arrival. It would not be the first time a publication was bought as a multiple of ego rather than earnings.

But in America, there is a growing disconnect in the narrative of business magazines. The world of titans that Malcolm Forbes once so vividly inhabited has become a lot less sexy. The mix of buffoonery and greed that created the financial meltdown in 2008 dispelled the image of businesspeople as heroes. Forbes’s worldview — “Business was originated to produce happiness,” B. C. Forbes asserted — has been overtaken by the grimness of a new economy, one that still produces billionaires that end up on the Forbes list, but few jobs to go with them.