They are getting richer but Bernard Arnault remains the boss. The heritages cumulative professionals of the 500 largest fortunes of France have increased by 5% in one year to exceed the symbolic bar of 1,000 billion euros, according to the ranking to be published Thursday of the magazine Challenges.
Bernard Arnault, the boss of the world’s number one luxury LVMH remains at the top of the ranking, which he has dominated since 2017, with an estimated fortune of 149 billion euros, against 157 billion in 2021, estimates Challenges. LVMH shares have lost 12% in twelve months at the Paris stock exchangebut Bernard Arnault, whose group is a 40% shareholder of Challenges, is the second richest man in the world behind the boss of Tesla Elon Muskaccording Forbes.
Forty new kids
In France, he is ahead of the family of Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, heirs of Chanel (80 billion euros), as well as the Hermès family (78.7 billion euros). The top ten weigh “half the total”, said Challenges. After having approached 1,000 billion euros in 2021, the cumulative value of the 500 largest fortunes in France exceeds this symbolic milestone in 2022, thanks to an increase of 5% over the year. Last year, in the midst of a pandemic Covid-19it had jumped “30%”.
The threshold for entry into this very select group “has continued to increase” and stands at 200 million euros. In 1996, in the era of the franc, it took the equivalent of 19 million euros to earn a place there. The “club of 500” version 2022 has “about forty new ones”. Only professional assets, listed or unlisted, are recognized, specifies Challenges.
Unicorns well represented
The owner of the shipping company CMA-CGM Rodolphe Saadé has made the best progress: +30 billion euros, a record since the creation of the ranking in 1996. “His group has benefited from the explosion in demand for imported products and transport fares”, notes the magazine. Symbols of their meteoric growth, particularly in tech, unicorns — unlisted startups valued at over $1 billion — are well represented.
Challenges has 34 shareholders or founders of these young shoots among the 500 largest French fortunes, with an average age of 34 years. Jacques Gaston Murray is 102 years old the dean of the ranking, displaying a fortune estimated at 1.6 billion euros. He is notably the owner of Sicli, a French brand specializing in fire safety.