Net Worth
Bernard Arnault had an unusual professional start for a CEO in the fashion industry: he began as an engineer and property developer in his family’s civil engineering company in the industrial north of France. By 1984, he had ambitions far beyond construction—and he began to make a series of bold and ruthless moves to take over an enterprise that he could scale at the global level. Toward that end, he bought Boussac, a famous (but bankrupt) French conglomerate, so that he could take over one of the businesses under its umbrella: The House of Dior, a prize he had coveted for years. After selling off most of the other assets, he reinvested the cash into his next luxury targets: Moët Hennessy and Louis Vuitton, two iconic French companies that merged into LVMH in 1987. Arnault’s net worth next move was a power play that made him infamous throughout Europe. Once in the door at LVMH, he used the constant feuding between the two CEOs to secure a controlling interest and then ousted the two