Are economic and political elites differently affected by transitions to democracy? Transitions to democracy compromise certain levels of elite replacement to gain legitimacy with certain levels of elite continuity to be functional. In different models of transitions to democracy, there are several mechanisms by which authoritarian economic and political elites can be affected by regime changes. In this paper, we argue that transitions to democracy exclusively affect political elites' fate, while economic elites remain unchanged even if they collaborated with the dictatorship. To show this, we rely on an original panel dataset built with a combination of archival and online sources to measure the maintenance of authoritarian elites in different models of transitions to democracy. Our dataset contains more than 4.000 profiles of the leading figures of the last years of the dictatorships of Spain, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Portugal, as well as the professional carrier of 10.000 children of these elites. We have collected the relative importance of the jobs that authoritarian elites and their children have during their lives, gathering information on more than 40.000 jobs over 50 years, totaling approximately 200.000 observations. Using mixed linear regressions, multinomial logit models, and event studies, we show how different kinds of transitions affected authoritarian elite continuity. Our results suggest that economic elites are unaffected by democratization regardless of the transition type and whether they were collaborators of the dictatorship. The transition type only determines the amount of authoritarian elite legacy in the short and long term for authoritarian political elites and their children. These results have critical normative implications for the expectations of democratic transitions.