A truly “fair” overtaking, which actually lasted only a few hours, but which made history: according to the real-time billionaire tracker by Forbes, the patron of LVMH Bernard Arnault surpassed the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos as the richest man on the planet. The event took place on Monday 24 May and represents news: only for the second time since these rankings on the super rich have existed, a Frenchman has risen to first place, even if for "only" 300 million and only for the time necessary for Forbes to break the news (“Since this story was published, Jeff Bezos has returned to number one"). In fact, Arnault has reached an estimated net worth of 186,3 billion dollars, against the 186 billion of Bezos who therefore "slakes a bit" after a 2020 in which, also thanks to the pandemic and the explosion of the e- commerce (but let's remember that deliveries are no longer Amazon's core from a profit point of view), had surpassed all rivals and by far, becoming the first man ever to exceed 200 billion dollars in assets.
However, the French manager has made a crazy comeback: in the last 14 months he has increased his portfolio by as much as 110 billion dollars, benefiting from the great year of LVMH, the luxury giant which includes brands of the caliber of Fendi, Moët & Chandon, Louis vuitton, Bulgari, Kenzo Givenchy, Tiffany and many others, and which has seen its shares grow by 77% in one year. Capitalization had risen to 320 billion by Monday, pushing Arnault's personal stake to more than 600 million. This performance, which arrived in the midst of the pandemic, was enabled by the very country that the pandemic seems to have left behind and which has long been the reference market in the world of luxury: China, where in the first quarter of 2021 the LVMH group recorded a turnover of 17 billion dollars, +32% compared to the same period of the previous year (partly conditioned by Covid). Arnault had come to be the second richest person in the world in 2019, and even there, on December 16, he managed to overtake Bezos in first place for a few hours. First place that has almost always been the preserve of the Americans, starting with Walton family in the 90s, then Warren Buffett and finally the tech era with Bill Gates first and then Jeff Bezos.
The only non-US before Arnault to move this ranking was for some time the Mexican Carlos Slim, which operates in telecommunications and which today is the first shareholder of the group that publishes the New York Times. The last twenty years have been marked by tech with Gates and Bezos at the top but also the constant affirmation at very high levels of the various Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Sergej Brin, Larry Page, Elon Musk (which on 24 May was confirmed on the third step of the podium with 147,3 billion) and so on and so forth. But silently the French have also asserted themselves: in addition to Arnault who has caressed the summit twice, there is his great rival in luxury, the owner of the Kering group François Pinault, who has more than doubled in the last 14 months own jackpot, from 27 to 55 billion. In addition, brothers Alain Wertheimer and Gerard Wertheimer (Chanel) are worth $35 billion, more than double their net worth of $17 billion in 2020 and also Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, granddaughter of the founder of L'Oréal and the first French woman to make the top ten billionaires in 2014, enjoyed an increase of nearly $40 billion to $87,8 billion.
