Bernard Arnault, the LVMH CEO who built a luxury giant, is one of the world's wealthiest people
Bernard Arnault is one of the world's richest people, worth $165 billion, per Bloomberg.
He controls the French luxury conglomerate LVMH, and his children all have roles in the business.
Here's a look at his career rise and how he spends his fortune.
No name is perhaps more synonymous with the world of luxury goods than Bernard Arnault.
Arnault, the 75-year-old CEO of French luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, built his fortune over almost four decades, amassing a luxury-goods empire that includes some of the best-known brands in fashion, jewelry, and alcohol, including Louis Vuitton, TAG Heuer, and Dom Pérignon.
In March, he briefly reclaimed the title of the world's richest person. He's since fallen to the fifth-richest, with a net worth of about $165 billion, on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index following a slide in LVMH stock this year.
He's preceded in the list by a handful of tech billionaires including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Arnault has also brought his five adult children into the LVMH fold, building a family-run business that has resulted in immense wealth and even drawn comparisons to the hit HBO show "Succession" — which Arnault has dismissed.
Now, as his son Alexandre Arnault steps into a senior management role at Moët Hennessy, LVMH's wines-and-spirits division, according to The Wall Street Journal, the stage is set for a new successor to lead the Arnault empire.
Here's a closer look at Arnault and his family's luxury empire.
The 75-year-old is CEO and chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, or LVMH.
Arnault and his family own a near-50% stake in LVMH.
He grew up in Roubaix, northern France and studied engineering at one of France's most prestigious schools, the École Polytechnique, before working for his father's construction company, Ferret-Savinel.
In 1984, Arnault acquired an ailing company called Agache-Willot-Boussac that owned brands including French department store Bon Marché and the fashion house Christian Dior.
He renamed the firm Financière Agache and initiated a turnaround, cutting costs and selling off some of its businesses.
In 1987, he bought the fashion house Celine and funded the French designer Christian Lacroix.
In the late 1980s, Arnault said his goal was to run the world's largest luxury company within the following decade.
In the late 1980s, Arnault said his goal was to run the world's largest luxury company.
He set his sights on LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, becoming its largest shareholder and then CEO in 1989.
Arnault married Anne Dewavrin in 1973.
The couple had two children, and during their marriage, Arnault moved the family to the United States for a couple of years in "open reaction to the rise of the French Socialists and their determination to tax the rich," France24 reported.
He and Dewavrin separated in 1990.
Arnault then married concert pianist Hélène Mercier in 1991.
Arnault reportedly wooed her by playing Chopin and other classical composers for her, according to Forbes.
Like many of his fellow billionaires, Arnault lives a lavish life.
He traveled by a $73 million private jet until 2022, selling it after Twitter accounts began tracking the aircraft. He owns properties in glitzy Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera.
In 2023, he bought $22 million worth of property in the Hamptons, The Observer reported.
The French billionaire and his wife live on Paris's Left Bank.
The Left Bank, which lies south of the Seine River, is a historic area that includes neighborhoods such as the Latin Quarter and St. Germain-des-Prés.
Arnault also has an impressive art collection of both modern and contemporary paintings that includes pieces by artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso, according to Bloomberg.
Arnault has five children: two with his first wife and three with his current wife.
Antoine and Delphine Arnault are his two children from his first marriage, while his youngest three — Alexandre, Frédéric, and Jean — are from his second marriage to Mercier, according to The New York Times.
Delphine, Arnault's oldest daughter, has established herself as a central figure in the LVMH empire.
She started her career at the American consultancy firm McKinsey in Paris and was the executive vice president at Louis Vuitton.
In January 2019, Delphine became the youngest member of LVMH's executive committee at age 43 before becoming CEO of Christian Dior Couture in 2023.
Delphine's younger brother Antoine is CEO of Christian Dior SE, the holding company of LVMH, a role he was appointed to in December 2022.
He was CEO of luxury shoemaker Berluti for several years but now serves as both chairman of that brand and cashmere label Loro Piana. Antoine has also been a board member of LVMH since 2006.
Antoine is married to supermodel Natalia Vodianova.
They reportedly met on a shoot for a 2008 Louis Vuitton campaign when he was the brand's head of communications.
The couple lives in Paris with their two children, and Vodianova's three children from a previous marriage, W Magazine reported.
Alexandre, the son of Bernard Arnault and Mercier, became an executive VP at Tiffany & Co. after LVMH bought the jewelry brand.
LVMH acquired Tiffany & Co. in 2021, after which Alexandre became its executive vice president of product and communications. Prior to moving over to Tiffany, Alexandre was the CEO of Rimowa, a German luggage brand owned by LVMH.
Alexandre is longtime friends with Evan Spiegel, the chief executive of Snap. Spiegel told The New York Times that Alexandre is "a really creative guy" and that "he's constantly thinking about the brand and how to express that."
Alexandre's younger brother Frédéric is CEO of LVMH Watches.
After internships at Facebook, McKinsey, and a stint running a mobile payments startup, Frédéric became the temporary head of connected technologies at TAG Heuer, LVMH's largest watch brand, in 2017. By 2020, when Frédéric was just 25, he was named TAG Heuer's CEO.
In 2024, he was appointed CEO of LVMH Watches, overseeing Hublot, TAG Heuer, and Zenith.
Arnault's youngest son, Jean, joined the family business in 2021.
In August 2021, Jean Arnault became marketing and product director in Louis Vuitton's watch division; he was just 23 at the time. He's since become a watch director at the brand.
Jean Arnault has a master's degree in financial mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a master's in mechanical engineering from Imperial College London. According to his LinkedIn profile, he interned at Morgan Stanley and McLaren Racing and worked in a Louis Vuitton retail store before joining the company full-time.
Arnault's network includes many people in high places. Arnault is reportedly longtime friends with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
He was a witness at Sarkozy's wedding to singer and model Carla Bruni, according to The New York Times.
Arnault can be seen shaking hands with Vladimir Putin during the Russian president's 2003 visit to the Château Cheval Blanc vineyard in France, which LVMH owns.
The 39-hectare vineyard is located in France's winemaking region of Bordeaux, according to LVMH's website.
Arnault considered the legendary designer and Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld a good friend.
In a statement upon Lagerfeld's death in 2019 on the LVMH website, Arnault said, "The death of this dear friend deeply saddens me, my wife and my children." He also said, "We loved and admired him deeply. Fashion and culture have lost a great inspiration."
Bernard Arnault met then President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York City, right before Trump's inauguration in 2017, to discuss expanding LVMH factories in the US.
The company opened a new 100,000-square-foot Louis Vuitton factory in Texas in 2019 and Trump attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Arnault said at the ceremony that he was honored to have the then-president in attendance and noted that the two have known each other since the 1980s.
But Arnault also has a longstanding public rivalry with François Pinault, the founder of luxury group Kering, who's worth about $30 billion.
Kering owns brands including Gucci and Yves St. Laurent, and the billionaire also owns Christie's auction house, according to Bloomberg. LVMH originally tried to acquire a majority stake in Gucci in 1999, but Pinault ultimately snatched up the brand, according to Forbes.
Over the years, Arnault has built LVMH into the largest luxury conglomerate in the world and earned himself an imposing nickname: "the wolf in the cashmere coat."
And he's confident in the luxury empire he's built, once telling the late Steve Jobs that demand for luxury goods like champagne may even outlast the almost $3 trillion dollar tech brand.
He previously told The New York Times, "Steve Jobs once asked me for some advice about retail, but I said, 'I am not sure at all we are in the same business.' I don't know if we will still use Apple products in 25 years, but I am sure we will still be drinking Dom Pérignon."
He's behind the creation of Foundation Louis Vuitton.
The Frank Gehry-designed contemporary art museum and performance space in Paris opened in 2014, according to The New York Times.
In April 2019, LVMH released a statement on behalf of the Arnault family, pledging 200 million euros, or about $226 million at the time, to help rebuild the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which was heavily damaged in a 2019 fire.
Arnault was not the only one among France's super rich who pledged funds toward rebuilding the historic structure. Others included his rival, Kering founder François-Henri Pinault, who pledged about $113 million, and L'Oreal owners the Bettencourt Meyers family, who pledged about $226 million.
In October 2020, Arnault's company agreed to buy Tiffany & Co. for $15.8 billion in the luxury sector's biggest-ever deal.
The contentious sale involved multiple lawsuits and a $400 million price drop from the price originally agreed upon the previous year.
When it comes to finances, the past few years have been a roller-coaster ride for Arnault and LVMH.
In January 2019, Arnault made $4.3 billion in a single day after LVMH shares surged 6.9%, according to Bloomberg.
Just six months later, on June 19, 2019, Arnault again made news when he became the third person in the world to reach a $100 billion net worth.
Then, the coronavirus pandemic hit, and pandemic-related shutdowns sank LVMH's stock, sending Arnault's personal net worth down more than $30 billion by May 2020, according to Bloomberg.
As the world opened up again, though, LVMH's stock recovered, thanks to strong sales in fashion and leather goods and an uptick in alcohol sales, particularly champagne.
At the tail end of 2022, Arnault dethroned Elon Musk to claim the top spot as the richest man in the world.
In April 2023, his net worth even surpassed the $200 billion mark, making him the third person ever, behind Musk and Jeff Bezos, to do so.
He's the world's fifth-richest person with a net worth of $165 billion, per Bloomberg's rich list, after seeing a $42 billion decline this year following a near-20% drop in LVMH stock.
The company faced some troubles in the first half of the year, with underlying revenues inching up only 2%, and income from recurring operations sliding by 8%. Its underlying profits tanked 26% in the Wines & Spirits business, 19% in Watches & Jewelry, and 6% in the key Fashion & Leather Goods segment.
In April 2023, LVMH's headquarters in Paris were briefly stormed by protesters who were opposed to the French government's proposal to raise the country's retirement age from 62 to 64.
On the same day, Arnault's fortune increased by $12 billion after a strong quarterly earnings report.
Arnault reportedly meets with his five children for a monthly lunch in the private dining room at LVMH to instruct them on the company's strategy and manager performance.
He also occasionally sees them for his weekend store walk-throughs.
Every Saturday, he visits some of his stores to check that everything is up to par; when things aren't, he "reels off texts and emails to his senior executives describing any perceived deficiencies in bullet points of obsessive detail," according to a Bloomberg profile of Arnault in June 2024.
Arnault has been pretty vague about who will eventually take the reins of the company.
"The best person inside the family or outside the family should be one day my successor," he's previously said. "But it's not something that I hope is a duel for the near future."
And much like the HBO series "Succession," there has been considerable speculation about which of Arnault's children will eventually take over the LVMH empire. Arnault, however, said he's taught his kids to prize the company over personal disagreements from a young age. "For now, they all get on great," he previously said.
He's also brushed off the comparisons to a Succession-style battle between his children for control of LVMH. The New York Times reported that "he hates this talk, and takes pains to play down parallels to the show."
"As for the future, I have five members of the family working in the group," he told Bloomberg in June. "Let's see if one of them has the capacity to take over."
Now, Alexandre Arnault is stepping into a senior management role at LVMH's Moët Hennessy, becoming the first of Arnault's five children to do so, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move puts him even closer to helming the luxury empire.
"I'm excited to step into a new chapter within LVMH's Wines & Spirits division, embracing this foundational part of our Group's heritage," Arnault wrote in a post on X.
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