The miserable triumph of Bernard Arnault, richest man in Europe

With all the controlled, incandescent fury of a monarch suffering the indignity of lèse-majesté, France and Europe’s richest man is out for revenge. Bernard Arnault, the lonely head of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey, also known as LVMH, is worth over $200bn. He is also deeply paranoid about journalists and a man of few words who, according to his outspoken wife “has no friends”.

What King Bernard does have are courtiers. But staff who work in Arnault’s vast luxury empire must stay trim and can be fired for so much as wearing a tie made by a rival brand. One Paris literary agent who met the boss was told to wear only Louis Vuitton – and absolutely nothing by either Kering or Hermès.

As a new in-depth investigation by Le Monde revealed, at LVMH’s offices, Arnault has his own lift and arrives late to meetings to avoid handshakes. New employees must learn to address members of the inner circle as “Monsieur” or “Madame”. This also applies to grandchildren, who are addressed this way from the age of seven. He has banned staff from speaking to media outlets including Mediapart, La Lettre and Le Canard enchaîné, on pain of dismissal.

“Le patron” (the boss) also owns Radio Classique and personally curates its playlist, banning composers like Berlioz. His concert pianist wife’s recordings are on heavy rotation.

Advertisers who cross him get cut off. L’Expansion, the business magazine, lost LVMH advertising after an unflattering report and a cartoon depicting Arnault as a wolf. Ex-police officers were sent to hunt down the sources used in the piece, and the magazine eventually went out of business. Left wing daily Libération also got the advertising axe after a “Get lost, you rich jerk” headline in response to his secret attempts to become a Belgian tax exile.

Arnault also runs a fair chunk of the French press himself, owning Les Echos, Le Parisien and Paris Match, and treats them less like newspapers than extensions of his own whims. Journalists at Les Echos are expected to fall in line with his Thatcherite economic politics.

Then there is the role of the wicked stepmother. The second wife, Hélène Mercier, is the investigation’s villain. After his remarriage, and despite a split custody arrangement, she reportedly packed up his then-teenage daughter Delphine’s belongings and left them on the porch to make room for her own son, who took her old bedroom. In the past few years, the disunity has become rancid, with Hélène calling Delphine’s partner, Xavier Niel, “the devil”.

“He’s not like us. All he talks about at the dinner table is billions. He’s obsessed with power, everything I hate. He’s never been part of the family,” Le Monde quoted Hélène as saying about Niel, “with a disgusted grimace.”

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She went on claiming the businessman wanted to “occupy all the space,” that he spends his time spreading gossip and rumours, and uses his political and media connections to tarnish the image of his enemies. In response, Niel and Delphine along with her brother Antoine Arnault, have explained to all and sundry that their stepmother is “delusional”.

Antoine, Bernard’s eldest son from his first marriage, has blocked Hélène’s number after hateful WhatsApp messages. Hélène, undeterred, has gone on a media tour calling the homeless “bums” who she says are making a “lifestyle choice”. She has also mused on her husband’s underwear habits, and said at the next election she’ll vote for the far left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon over Marine Le Pen. Arnault himself, the investigation says, seems “paralysed” by it all, reduced to begging his children to “put an end to the rumours”.

He is obsessed with art, tax minimisation and his rivals at Hermès and also Kering, the business controlled by François Pinault that owns brands such as Gucci, YSL and Balenciaga – and now the head of the vast French luxury empire has launched himself onto Elon Musk’s X, at the age of 77.

His target is Le Monde, which depicted him as the “last king of France” and spilled many of the revelations contained in this article. The portrait in Le Monde was a scorching six-part investigation that dripped with excruciating detail about the patriarch’s five children from two marriages. This is Succession, but the version that would make Rupert Murdoch blush.

Musk and the online extreme right reactionary international have rushed in with breathy praise for the “elegant” septuagenarian’s sudden colourful appearance on X, where he has quickly amassed more than 100K followers. Arnault took to the hate-site to say Merci! to Le Monde.

“I am well aware that by responding, I am giving this saga the spotlight it may have been hoping for, a final episode penned by me. So be it,” Arnault wrote, in a long message that contained not a single denial. “Let it at least serve one purpose: to save energy for all those who are betting on a family rift to sell newspapers. They will be waiting a long time.”

Alongside taking aim at the excellent investigative work of Raphaëlle Bacqué and Vanessa Schneider, Arnault also took an open stab at his “son-in-law” (his inverted commas, in his three-page response posted first on LVMH corporate account on X then on his newly established one) Xavier Niel. The fellow billionaire, a telecoms and tech baron, long-term partner of Arnault’s daughter Delphine, father of two of her children, and the largest individual shareholder in Le Monde, stands suspected of having ordered the meticulous profile of “our father,” as the children must call him (“Monsieur” for everyone else).

A gloating Musk, back on his idée fixe of a media conspiracy against poor persecuted billionaires like himself and Arnault, hailed the arrival of another billionaire buddy on his platform: “The best way to communicate with the world is directly in your own words, not through the reality-distortion nightmare mirror that is the legacy mainstream press.”

Other uber-wealthy titans queued up Versailles-style to fête Arnault and join the pile-on in the press. “Worth a read. Bernard Arnault responds to the press. X has shifted the balance of power away from the media and back to the people,” said Trump pal and anti-woke billionaire Bill Ackman, that ultimate man of the people.

In France, the far-right media magnate Vincent Bolloré hopped on X to applaud his brother-in-arms for putting two classy, bejewelled fingers up at the independent press. “I am overjoyed at the arrival of Bernard Arnault on X! Everyone knows of his exceptional success… he is also a person of great depth and a great heart.” Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, duly swooped in too, to praise the sovereign of all that is luxe.

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Not everyone agreed. “Unless you’re a complete sycophant, it’s hard to understand what is supposedly ‘remarkable’ about Arnault’s little missive,” said Swiss historian Olivier Schmitt. “All he does is attempt a bit of irony with prepubescent schoolboy humour, without ever disputing the substance of the investigation. I know that in France sniggering is often mistaken for wit, but this really is about as lame as it gets.”

When he’s generous he makes a fuss about it, as he did when he gave €200m for the reconstruction of Notre Dame, an act of generosity spoiled by the fact that he then bragged about it. But if a friend wants to use the tennis court he owns in Paris, he makes them rent it from his secretary. When his children were younger and he took them to dinner with a girlfriend, he’d demand they hand over the receipts afterwards.

Enraged at being defeated in anything, even tennis, he avoids matches and prefers to hit with his coach. When he plays doubles with his children and his friend Roger Federer, he makes sure to be on Federer’s side. “In business, he can be a very sore loser,” said the advertising executive Maurice Lévy, who once tried to broker peace between Arnault and his great business rival François Pinault. “His weakness is that it’s not enough for him to be happy, or to be number one. He wants to see others brought down.”

As the investigation explains, Arnault is one of Europe’s biggest art buyers and he owns works by, among others, Bacon, Rothko, Basquiat and Koons. But the Fondation Louis Vuitton, his €800m Frank Gehry-designed art gallery, was built in a way so that 60% of the cost were effectively borne by French taxpayers via tax breaks for philanthropists. Recently the French Court of Auditors found LVMH saved €518m in taxes this way between 2007 and 2017. He still bristled when journalists pointed this out.

Consumed by envy and hatred of the competition, he has never forgiven François Pinault for snatching Gucci in 1999. “He’ll never let me go,” sighs Pinault. He has also pursued Hermès for years, quietly amassing 23% of the family firm before a 2014 truce.

It then emerged that the former LVMH executive Pierre Godé hired former intelligence chief Bernard Squarcini, “The Shark”, and former police officers to run surveillance operations on Hermès. Squarcini got a two-year suspended sentence in 2025 and LVMH paid a €10m settlement. There was no trial. Employees still reportedly fear having their phones and devices tapped.

The quasi-takeover of Paris landmarks like the Louvre and the area around the Pont Neuf for fashion and luxury events is notorious. At the Paris Olympics, LVMH brands got unprecedented exposure: Dior gowns, Chaumet medals, Vuitton trunks for the Olympic flame – a level of sponsorship privilege the IOC had never granted before.