24/04/2024, 19:00 The $100 Billion Man: How Bernard Arnault Stitched Together The World’s Third Biggest

Biggest Fortune With Louis Vuitton, Dior And 77 Other…

FORBES LEADERSHIP EDUCATION

DAILY COVER

The $100 Billion Man:

How Bernard Arnault
Stitched Together
The World’s Third
Biggest Fortune With
Louis Vuitton, Dior
And 77 Other Brands
—And Why He’s Not
Done Yet

Susan Adams Former Staff

I’m a senior editor in charge of Forbes’ education coverage.

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1 Oct 31, 2019, 06:00am EDT

This story appears in the November 30, 2019 issue of

Forbes Magazine.
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B
ernard Arnault inspires me,”
says Sheron Barber.

The 38-year-old has traveled from Los

Angeles to the palatial Louis Vuitton store on
Paris’ Place Vendôme during the height of fall
Fashion Week to pay tribute to his idol, the head
of luxury colossus LVMH. Barber is a
spectacular sight. He has dyed black dollar signs
in his close-cropped fuchsia and yellow hair, a
green grill covering his teeth and multiple Louis
Vuitton luggage locks dangling from the
stainless-steel chain encircling his neck. “I spent
a couple hundred thousand last year on LV,” he
says. He earns a handsome living customizing
the looks of music acts like Migos and Post
Malone. In his latest video, “Saint-Tropez,” Post
Malone wears a chest plate constructed by
Barber that is a blend of black leather and a
Vuitton bag. Of Arnault, Barber declares: “He
has single-handedly defined modern luxury.”

“It’s a most exceptional Louis Vuitton maison,”

Arnault says of the Place Vendôme store,
speaking English with a distinct French accent.
“You can see the entire universe of the brand.”
Opened two years ago, the space feels like a
cross between a museum and a private club. An
array of Vuitton’s wares are displayed inside
gleaming vitrines and on artfully placed shelves.

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Marble staircases with glass balustrades lead to

a private atelier on the fourth floor where six
seamstresses create bespoke dresses for
celebrities like Lady Gaga and Emma Stone. “I
was very involved in the design,” Arnault says.

He obsessively tracks his top brands, especially

Louis Vuitton, the conglomerate’s cash machine,
which accounted for nearly a quarter of LVMH’s
2018 revenue of $54 billion and up to 47% of
profits, according to analysts. (LVMH shares
financials for its top five divisions but not for its
individual brands.) Vuitton’s selection of bags,
apparel and accessories, which the company
never wholesales or discounts, is an ever-
changing mixture of classic and contemporary,
like an $8,600 limited-edition twist on its
Capucines purse in turquoise leather with an
appliqué pattern designed by Tschabalala Self, a
29-year-old artist from Harlem. American Virgil
Abloh, 39, Vuitton’s new menswear designer,
created a stir early this year when he debuted
glow-in-the-dark bags that use fiber optics to
illuminate the LV logo in the colors of the
rainbow.

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“Why are brands like Louis Vuitton and Dior so

successful?” Arnault asks. “They have these two
aspects, which may be contradictory: They are
timeless, [and] they are at the utmost level of
modernity. . . . It’s like fire and water.”

That paradox has translated into record sales

and profits at LVMH, whose roster of more than
70 brands includes Fendi, Bulgari, Dom
Pérignon and Givenchy. That, in turn, has
helped drive up LVMH’s stock price, which has
nearly tripled in less than four years. Arnault,
who owns 47% of the company’s shares with his
family, is now worth $102 billion, $68 billion
more than he was in 2016. He is the third-
richest person on earth, just behind Jeff Bezos
($110 billion) and Bill Gates ($106 billion).

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And at 70, Arnault is far from done. In late

October, LVMH made an unsolicited $14.5
billion bid for the 182-year-old American jeweler
Tiffany. If the deal goes through, it will be
Arnault’s biggest acquisition ever. “If you
compare us to Microsoft, [we are] small,” he
says. Indeed, LVMH’s market value of $214
billion lags far behind the software giant’s $1.1
trillion. “It’s just the beginning,” says Arnault.

Arnault’s beginnings in France’s industrial

north were far removed from the glittering perch
he now occupies. His first love was music, but he
didn’t have the talent to make it as a concert
pianist. Instead, after graduating from an elite
French engineering school in 1971, he joined his
father at the construction firm founded by his
grandfather in the city of Roubaix.

An exchange with a New York cab driver that

same year planted a seed that would grow into
LVMH. Arnault asked the cabbie if he knew of
France’s president, Georges Pompidou. “No,”
replied the driver, “but I know Christian Dior.”

LOUIS VUITTON MALLETIER

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Vuitton’s Versailles

At age 25, Arnault took charge of the family

business. After socialist François Mitterrand
became France’s president in 1981, Arnault
moved to the States and tried to build a division
there. But his ambitions were bigger than
construction. He wanted an enterprise he could
scale, a business with French roots and
international reach.

In 1984, when he learned that Christian Dior

was for sale, he pounced. Its parent, a textile and
disposable-diaper company called Boussac, had
gone bankrupt, and the French government was
looking for a buyer. Arnault put up $15 million
of his family’s money, and Lazard supplied the
rest of the $80 million purchase price. At the
time, according to reports, he made a pledge to
revive operations and preserve jobs, but instead
he fired 9,000 workers and pocketed $500
million, selling off most of the business. Critics
recoiled at his brazenness, which seemed more
American than genteel French. The media later
dubbed Arnault “the wolf in the cashmere coat.”

Arnault’s next prey was Dior’s perfume division,

which had been sold to Louis Vuitton Moët
Hennessy, and a fight between the company’s
brand heads gave him an opening. First, he
teamed up with the boss of Vuitton, the leather-
goods company whose founder had made
custom trunks for Empress Eugénie, the wife of
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Napoleon III. Arnault helped the head of Vuitton

oust Moët’s chief, only to get rid of him, too. By
1990, again backed by Lazard and using the cash
from Boussac, he had taken control of the
company, which included Moët & Chandon, the
famous French champagne maker, and
Hennessy, the French cognac producer that
dates to 1765.

After conquering Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy,

Arnault spent billions to acquire leading
European companies in fashion, fragrance,
jewelry and watches, and fine wines and spirits.
Since 2008, LVMH has purchased 20, bringing
the total to 79 brands. In 2011 it paid nearly $5
billion for the Italian jeweler Bulgari in a mostly
stock deal. Two years later it bought the fine-
wool purveyor Loro Piana for a reported $2.6
billion. Arnault’s most recent acquisition was in
April when LVMH paid $3.2 billion for the
London-based hotel group Belmond, whose
opulent holdings include the Cipriani hotel in
Venice, the luxury train line Orient Express and
three ultra-luxe safari lodges in Botswana.

Fashion Circles
LVMH divides its 79 brands into five
groups. Highlighted below is the
biggest business within each.

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SOURCES: LVMH; LUCA SOLCA, BERNSTEIN

“Bernard Arnault is a predator, not a creator,”

says a banker who was close to the Boussac
deal.

Arnault has not succeeded at every conquest. In

2001 he lost what the media called the “handbag
war” for control of fabled Italian fashion house
Gucci, to his French luxury rival, François
Pinault. Over the next decade, LVMH used a
stealth tactic common among hedge funds—
cash-settled equity swaps—to secretly acquire
17% of Hermès, the 182-year-old maker of fine
silk scarves and the iconic Birkin bag. Hermès
fought Arnault off in a protracted battle that
ended in 2017 with LVMH relinquishing most of
its Hermès shares.

Up close, Arnault’s polished appearance is like a

suit of armor. On an overcast Friday morning in
late September, he is attired in a selection of
LVMH brands, including a pin-striped suit by
Celine, a navy tie by Loro Piana, black leather

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slip-ons by Berluti and a white cuff-linked shirt

by Dior with his initials embroidered just below
his heart. Slim and 6 foot 1, he stays fit playing
four hours of tennis a week, sometimes with his
friend Roger Federer. “I try not to be fat, as you
see, and I do a lot of sports,” he says.

Those games are among his only breaks from a

workaholic schedule that starts at 6:30 a.m. in
his 17th-century mansion in the posh 7th
Arrondissement on Paris’s Left Bank. He begins
each morning listening to classical music,
scanning industry news and texting family
members and brand chiefs. “What I have in
mind every morning is that the desirability of a
brand should be as strong in ten years,” he says.
“It’s really the key to our success.” By 8 a.m. he’s
in his office at 22 Avenue Montaigne, where he
stays as late as 9 p.m. Occasionally he’ll take a
20-to-30-minute pause to play the Yamaha
grand piano in a room down the hall from his
ninth-floor office.

LANDON NORDEMAN/TRUNK ARCHIVE (LEFT); ERIK MADIGAN HECK/TRUNK ARCHIVE

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LVMH’s Fresh Faces

“He works 24 hours,” says Delphine Arnault, 44,

Arnault’s oldest child, from his first marriage,
and the executive vice president of Louis
Vuitton. “When he sleeps, he’s dreaming of new
ideas.”

Every Saturday, he prowls his retail stores,

rearranging bag displays and making
suggestions to clerks. He visits as many as 25
stores, including the competition, in a single
morning. “It’s a ritual,” says his son Frédéric, 25,
who works at LVMH’s top watch brand, TAG
Heuer.

Arnault relays details from his store visits to the

chiefs of his top brands. He recently alerted
Louis Vuitton CEO Michael Burke that the new
“it” bag, the $2,480 Onthego tote, was not in
stock at the Place Vendôme shop. “He complains
when too many SKUs are sold out,” says Burke,
who has worked with Arnault since 1980.

At least once a month, Arnault travels in his

Bombardier jet to some corner of his empire. In
October, he visited the small town of Keene,
Texas, where he and Donald Trump cut the
ribbon on the first of two new Louis Vuitton
workshops slated to create 1,000 jobs over the
next five years. (The brand already has two
workshops in California.) “I am not here to judge
his types of policies. I have no political role,”

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said Arnault to reporters. Still, the event sparked

a flash of controversy within his own ranks.
Vuitton’s womenswear artistic director, Nicolas
Ghesquière, wrote on Instagram: “I am a fashion
designer refusing this association #trumpisajoke
#homophobia.” Arnault didn’t respond to
Ghesquière’s dig.

In late October, Arnault, Burke and Dior CEO

Pietro Beccari were set to fly to Seoul to visit
stores, including a new Frank Gehry-designed
Vuitton outpost. It’s the sixth Vuitton store to
include an art gallery that will show selections
from the extensive collection of the LVMH-
funded Fondation Louis Vuitton, which also
rotates through the Fondation’s $135 million
Paris museum (also designed by Gehry).

JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES

La Vie Arnault

Even with the conglomerate’s massive footprint

around the world—4,590 shops in 68 countries
—store openings and closings often depend as
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much on Arnault’s gut and a neighborhood’s

ambience as on more traditional metrics like
sales per square foot. In China, one of LVMH’s
most important markets, he limits the number
of Louis Vuitton shops to control the pace of
expansion.

Last year, Louis Vuitton shuttered a store in Fort

Lauderdale, Florida, because adjacent shops,
restaurants and parking weren’t ritzy enough.
Arnault visited a property on the Champs-
Élysées multiple times before he approved a new
Dior store near the Arc de Triomphe that opened
in July, despite data showing the previous
tenant had sluggish sales. “He pushes you to
really be sure,” Dior chief Beccari says. “He
wants to challenge you, that’s his tactic.”

Showing up rivals is another tactic. In

July, as apparel brands were competing to see
who could be the most eco-conscious, he
announced a partnership with the British
fashion designer Stella McCartney (daughter of
Paul), who has long touted her sustainability
efforts (she says she refuses to use glue in her
sneaker line because it’s made from boiled
animal parts). Arnault invited McCartney, who
in 2018 ended a 17-year partnership with the
Pinault family’s Kering luxury group (owner of
Gucci), to become his “special advisor.” She
accepted, despite LVMH’s decision to continue
to make products with leather and fur (and
glue). Arnault also declined to join the “Fashion
Pact,” led by Kering and signed by 32 apparel
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makers, including Chanel, Hermès, fast-fashion

giant H&M and even McCartney, who all
pledged to lower carbon emissions.

Arnault then made his own series of eco-

gestures during Fashion Week, when the media
converged on Paris to cover the shows. At
Tuesday’s Dior show, where models paraded
across a stage decorated with 170 trees in dirt-
filled burlap bags, the press was told that the
theme was sustainability and that the electricity
at the event was produced with generators
powered by canola oil. The next evening, LVMH
hosted 50 journalists for a two-and-a-half-hour
event in an auditorium at company
headquarters. Arnault and ten LVMH brand
chiefs took turns on a brightly lit stage reciting
their commitments to environmental
stewardship, their presentations interspersed
with slickly produced videos of models strutting
down catwalks and cashmere goats frolicking on
the Mongolian steppes.

Mid-event, Arnault was asked to share his

thoughts on young climate activists like 16-year-
old Greta Thunberg. “I’m a natural optimist,” he
said, “unlike Greta, who has a big problem, and
that’s projecting an outrageous amount of
pessimism in her messages without any real
solutions.”

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KARL LAGERFELD, JEAN-FRANÇOIS ROBERT, MAZEN SAGGAR, KARL LAGERFELD

En Famille

Not surprising for a corporate titan, he prefers

not to dwell on problems. “He doesn’t like to
hear the word ‘no,’” says Anna Wintour, the
longtime Vogue editor. “It’s not part of his
vocabulary.” Not from rivals, acquisition targets
or even environmental champions.

McCartney is one of many big names he’s reeled

in. In 2017, LVMH launched a cosmetics line,
Fenty Beauty, with the pop star Rihanna,
distributing the products through its retail
beauty chain Sephora’s 2,600 stores.
Capitalizing on Fenty’s broad-audience offerings
—its foundation comes in 40 skin shades—and
on its founder’s 77 million Instagram followers,
the division will hit $550 million in sales this
year, Arnault says. He’s betting that Fenty
Fashion, the apparel collection LVMH debuted
with Rihanna in May, will meet with similar
success. “She brings a different vision of

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fashion,” Arnault says. “For the future, it’s very

good for us to be connected to Millennials.”

To keep his brands modern, he also looks to

his five children from two marriages, four of
whom work at LVMH: Delphine, 44; Antoine,
42; Alexandre, 27; and Frédéric, 25. His
youngest child, Jean, 21, will likely join the
company when he finishes school, according to
Alexandre.

Shortly after he started as strategy and digital

director at the Swiss watch brand TAG Heuer 13
months ago, Frédéric Arnault pitched an idea to
his father over dinner. To enhance the brand’s
smartwatch for golfers, he wanted to acquire a
French startup, FunGolf, that had built an app
with detailed terrain data on 39,000 courses.
Players could use it to measure how far they
were from sand traps or greens. “The people in
the M&A department thought I was crazy,” he
says. But once he made the case to his father,
says Frédéric, “He said, ‘Go for it.’”

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JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES

Micromanager

Alexandre Arnault says Bernard was quick to

green-light tech deals Alexandre spearheaded at
the family investment vehicle, Groupe Arnault,
including bets on Spotify, Slack, Airbnb, Uber
and Lyft. Then, in 2016, he persuaded LVMH to
pay $719 million for an 80% stake in the 121-
year-old German luggage maker Rimowa,
favored by A-listers like David Beckham and
Angelina Jolie. At Rimowa, Alexandre later led
product collaborations with au courant brands
like the American skateboarding line Supreme.

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Delphine, meanwhile, leads the six-year-old

LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize, awarded
each year to one designer chosen from
thousands of applicants. Louis Vuitton’s Virgil
Abloh was a finalist for the 2015 prize (he had
interned at Fendi in 2009 with his friend Kanye
West). And LVMH has launched an accelerator
program for up to 50 promising startups in the
luxury goods sector at Paris’ Station F, the
brainchild of French billionaire Xavier Niel, who
also happens to be Delphine’s long-term partner
and the father of the couple’s two children.

So what do Arnault’s offspring say about which

one of them is likely to lead the company one
day? As though reading from the same script,
they all sidestep the question. “Our father is very
young,” says Delphine. “He’ll work for 30 more
years,” Alexandre says. “I don’t think he’ll ever
stop,” says Antoine, head of LVMH corporate
communications and chief of Berluti. “This is
not a topic we think about,” Frédéric says. “We
hope he is going to stay as long as possible in
this role.”

“People ask me all the time,” says Arnault.

“What is most important for the group is we find
the best, and we’ll see if it’s in the family or
outside the family.” How long will he work? “I
have no end decided.”

Though he won’t say which of his children he is

most likely to promote, he is eager to talk about
their talents. He shows off a video on his iPhone
11 of Frédéric playing a Liszt sonata in
preparation for a concert he will give at a music
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festival outside Paris together with his mother.

Canadian-born pianist Hélène Mercier-Arnault,
59, performs regularly as a soloist and chamber
musician. “Like a professional,” Arnault says
about Frédéric’s skill. “I’m not playing like that.”

As for sibling rivalry, Arnault and his children

paint a portrait of family harmony. The siblings
often gather for Saturday lunch with their
parents, and they all spend some of August at
the Arnault compound in Saint-Tropez. Only
Frédéric admits that discord surfaces on the
tennis court. “It can get quite tense,” he says.
“Our father is very competitive. He doesn’t like
losing. This is something he’s transmitted to us.”
No one close to the family will make an on-the-
record prediction about succession. But one
longtime observer says that when Arnault finally
steps down “It will be Game of Thrones.”

Closing In
LVMH stock has been soaring, making
Arnault one of three people in the
world worth more than $100 billion.
He’s $4 billion behind Bill Gates and
lags Jeff Bezos by just $8 billion.

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12/31/2015 01/06/2017 01/05/2018 01/04/2019

S&P 500
12/01/17: 129.27

Arnault sees the future playing out quite

differently, convinced that his tight-knit family’s
control will give LVMH an edge for years to
come. In his own mind, he’s going up against not
only his competitors in the luxury sector but also
global giants. He calls Microsoft a “beautiful
company” but notes that Gates has held onto
only a small number of shares. “Long-term he
won’t be there,” he muses.

Before proclaiming his vision for his

conglomerate, he catches himself. “In a way, I
should not say that, because you may think I am
https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/10/31/the-100-billion-man-how-bernard-arnault-stitched-together-the-worlds-third-biggest-fortune-with-louis… 19/21
24/04/2024, 19:00 The $100 Billion Man: How Bernard Arnault Stitched Together The World’s Third Biggest Fortune With Louis Vuitton, Dior And 77 Other…

pretentious,” he says. But then he lets loose:

“[LVMH] is a French monument. Because it
represents France all over the world. People
know better the name of Louis Vuitton,
Christian Dior, Dom Pérignon, Cheval Blanc,
than anything else. Maybe they know also
Napoleon? General de Gaulle? We think it’s
important that this group, for the long term, is
controlled by a French family.”

Cover Photograph by Jamel Toppin for Forbes.

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Susan Adams

In February 2018, I took on a new job managing and

writing Forbes' education coverage. I'd spent the
previous two years on the Entrepreneurs team,
following six years writing for the... Read More

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/10/31/the-100-billion-man-how-bernard-arnault-stitched-together-the-worlds-third-biggest-fortune-with-louis… 20/21
24/04/2024, 19:00 The $100 Billion Man: How Bernard Arnault Stitched Together The World’s Third Biggest Fortune With Louis Vuitton, Dior And 77 Other…

15 December, 2022
Excellent article, what a fascinating
glimpse of a brilliant and creative mind
and man. Thanks, Susan for such an
informative article.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/10/31/the-100-billion-man-how-bernard-arnault-stitched-together-the-worlds-third-biggest-fortune-with-louis… 21/21