With a net worth of $210.8 billion (£168bn) at the time of writing, according to Forbes, Bernard Arnault is the richest person in the world. The chairman and CEO of fashion giant LVMH Möet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Arnault, went from taking over his father's construction company to managing one of the planet's biggest conglomerates.
Read on to discover the story of the so-called Pope of Fashion, who recently dethroned Elon Musk as the world's wealthiest man. All dollar values are in US dollars.
Now 74 years old, Arnault was born Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault on 5 March 1949 in Roubaix, Northern France (pictured). He went to school in Roubaix and Lille before studying engineering at the École Polytechnique in Paris, graduating in 1971.
Arnault's father Jean Léon owned a civil engineering company called Ferret-Savinel. After graduating from the École Polytechnique, Arnault started working for the company as an engineer – and within three years he'd turned the business's focus to real estate under the new name Férinel. He quickly became the company director and president, replacing his father by the time he was 30.
In 1973 Arnault married Anne Dewavrin. They have two children: Delphine (left) and Antoine (right), pictured here with their father at an exhibition in September 2021.
In 1984 Arnault left Férinel and bought the near-bankrupt textile company Boussac, stripping all its assets apart from the department store Bon Marché and fashion house Christian Dior. In interviews, he's described his mother Marie-Josèphe Savinel as having an "obsession" with Dior while he was growing up.
In 1987 Arnault founded LVMH, overseeing the merger between luxury houses Möet Hennessy and Louis Vuitton. Backed by the Irish brewers Guinness, Arnault became LVMH's biggest shareholder, taking over the company as chairman and CEO just two years later.
Arnault is pictured here with LVMH's then-vice-president Alain Chevalier, who was CEO of Möet Hennessy at the time.
Arnault quickly expanded LVMH with a series of luxury acquisitions, which he deliberately kept separate from the parent group: Céline in 1988; Berluti and Kenzo in 1993; perfumer Guerlain in 1994; Loewe in 1996; Marc Jacobs and cosmetics department store Sephora in 1997; Thomas Pink in 1999; Emilio Pucci in 2000; and Fendi, DKNY and French department store La Samaritaine in 2001.
There have been a few surprises among the luxury brands in Arnault’s buying sprees. When he bought Berluti and Kenzo in 1993, he also bought the French newspaper La Tribune. He sold it, then snapped up financial newspaper Les Echos and daily newspaper Le Parisien.
In 1990, Arnault married his second wife Hélène Mercier (pictured), a French-Canadian concert pianist. The couple now lives in Paris' Left Bank. They have three sons: Alexandre, Frédéric, and Jean. Arnault is also an amateur classical pianist.
Despite being a decidedly French group, Arnault wanted a grand American presence for LVMH. The company's flagship US headquarters, the 23-storey sculpted glass LVMH Tower (second from left), opened on 57th Street in New York in 1999, with a Christian Dior boutique on the first two floors.
In 1999, Arnault began what the New York Post described as "the bloodiest fight in fashion": a "creeping takeover" bid for Gucci. When his shares topped 34%, Gucci retaliated by creating an employee stock option plan to dilute his stake. Gucci then sold out to François Pinault’s PPR (now Kering) for $2.92 billion, the equivalent of over $5 billion (£4bn) in today's money. Arnault took the case to court but lost.
Arnault tried to break the duopoly of auction houses Christie’s (owned by fellow billionaire François Pinault) and Sotheby’s by buying British art auction house Phillips in 1999. After making a failed bid for Sotheby’s, he later bought the French house Tajan in 2001 but backed out of the battle within a couple of years. The game is not completely over, however, as he invested an undisclosed sum of money in the German online auction site Auctionata in 2015.
Arnault invested heavily in the dotcom boom. Having bought into MP3.com and eBay, he set up a European internet fund called Europ@web with $91 million (£73.4m) of his own money. In 2000, however, as he was about to float it for $3.3 billion (the equivalent of $5.7bn/£4.6bn today), one of his major gambles, e-tailer Boo.com, went into liquidation. Europ@web was quietly shelved.
Arnault has had better success with other cyber ventures though. In July 1999 he reportedly invested $30 million ($53.6m/£43.3m today) in Netflix when it was still a DVD rental firm, before carrying out a planned divestment a few years later.
It might seem an unlikely pairing, but Apple’s Steve Jobs sought Arnault's advice when he was thinking about opening Apple stores in the early 2000s. Arnault says Jobs told him: "You know, Bernard, I don’t know if in 50 years’ time my iPhone will still be a success but I can tell you, I’m sure everybody will drink your Dom Pérignon".
Members of the Arnault family are keen skiers and, in 2006, LVMH opened the Cheval Blanc ski resort in Courchevel. The hotel group now has resorts in the French West Indies, Maldives, St Tropez, and Paris.
Every billionaire seems to have a superyacht – but why buy just one when you can snap up a whole yacht company? LVMH bought Princess Yachts in 2008 for around $257 million (£207m). It also bought shipyard Royal Van Lent, which built Arnault’s 101-metre mega-yacht Symphony. Boasting eight staterooms, a glass-bottom swimming pool, and room for 36 passengers, the impressive vessel is thought to be worth $152 million (£122.7m).
At the suggestion of his son Antoine, Arnault decided to throw open LVMH’s doors in 2011. 'Les Journées Particulières' now take place each October, when members of the public can tour dozens of LVMH houses, including the Louis Vuitton ateliers in Asnières and Fendi’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome. Some 20,000 people visited in 2022.
In 2012, Belgium revealed that Arnault had applied for dual citizenship, as Paris looked to impose a now-defunct 75% tax on incomes over $1.13 million (£910k). He denied doing it for tax reasons and withdrew the application a year later as "a gesture of my attachment to France and my faith in its future", saying all French people should "do their bit" for the country.
Arnault was made an honorary Grand Officer of the French Legion of Honour in 2011. Two years later, he was made a KBE – Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire – for "services to business and the wider community", thanks to LVMH’s ownership of British brands such as Thomas Pink and Glenmorangie whisky.
Arnault took designer John Galliano under his wing in 1995, making him the first Briton to head a French haute couture house at Givenchy and then Dior. Galliano even made Arnault's daughter Delphine’s wedding dress. But after making anti-Semitic comments in a bar, Galliano was sacked in 2011 and convicted of making public insults. He sued the house of Dior and Galliano for wrongful dismissal; in 2014, a French labour court ruled against him, although he was only made to pay a nominal $1.13 (91p).
In 2014 Arnault agreed to relinquish his 23% stake in French design house Hermès and not to buy any shares in the luxury rival for five years. It ended an acrimonious four-year attempt to buy out control of the scarf-maker, with lawsuits filed by both sides amid accusations of insider trading, blackmail, and unfair competition.
Arnault remained Dior’s biggest individual shareholder until 2017, when he announced a $13.1 billion (£10.6bn) deal to acquire Christian Dior and fold it into LVMH. This purchase made him Europe’s wealthiest man.
In late 2018, LVMH announced that it had acquired luxury hotel, train, and river cruise company Belmond for $3.2 billion (£2.6bn). Belmond, formerly known as Orient-Express, was established more than 40 years ago with the acquisition of Hotel Cipriani in Venice and has a portfolio of 46 hotels, restaurants, and rail and river cruise experiences.
Four of Arnault’s five children have entered the world of LVMH.
Antoine (far left) is chairman of Loro Piana, chief executive of Berluti, and chief executive of the family's holding company Christian Dior SE.
Delphine (second left) is a director and executive vice president at Louis Vuitton and the head and CEO of Dior.
Meanwhile, Alexandre (far right) is president and chief executive of Rimowa, and his brother Frédéric became strategy and digital director at luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer in 2018.
Delphine's appointment as the head of Christian Dior seems to form part of an effort by Bernard to cement his family's control over the LVMH empire. Many people believe that Delphine will ultimately succeed her father as president of the conglomerate.
As The Guardian reports, there is a risk of a succession battle between Delphine and her younger brother Antoine, who in December 2022 was promoted to run the holding company that manages LVMH and Bernard's colossal fortune.
Richard Branson has Necker Island and Oracle’s Steve Ellison owns 98% of Hawaii’s Lana'I. Meanwhile, Bernard Arnault reportedly owns the 133-acre Indigo Island in the Bahamas’ 360-island Exuma Cays, where neighbours include magician David Copperfield and actor Johnny Depp.
Arnault, pictured here with former French president François Hollande and Frank Gehry in front of an oil painting by Gerhard Richter, is a serious art collector, with a treasure trove of thousands of works including pieces by Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso. He says the first piece he bought in the early 1980s was a painting by Monet.
Arnault is reportedly a keen tennis fan and has widely expressed his admiration for Swiss tennis star Roger Federer, who works as an ambassador for Möet Chandon. At a party, Arnault called him a "living god" and has even played doubles with his idol alongside his sons.
Demonstrating Arnault’s philanthropic side, LMVH pledged $224 million (£180.6m) to a fund to restore Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral after a devastating fire ripped through the 850-year-old church in April 2019. LMVH called its donation a show of "solidarity with this national tragedy".
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck almost a year later, LVMH made another charitable gesture when it paused perfume production at three of its factories to start producing hand sanitiser instead. The fashion giant donated the sanitiser "at no charge" to public hospitals in Paris and other French health authorities. In July 2020, it also donated 10,000 tubes of sanitiser gel to the charity Secours Populaire Français, which organises days out for vulnerable families and children.
It goes without saying that LVMH is a huge success. Following the high-profile acquisition of luxury jeweller Tiffany & Co in January 2021, the conglomerate is now the most valuable company in Europe and currently comprises 75 brands, including Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty line. Arnault says he was heavily criticised for putting so many brands into one group but that competitors now try to imitate the model, "which is very rewarding for us".
LVMH keeps going from strength to strength, which is why Arnault is now the world’s richest person. Only time will tell whether he'll be top of the pile for long, but one thing's for sure: he's certainly giving Elon Musk a serious run for his money.
Now discover which multinational companies are abandoning China, and why