Elon Musk has officially lost his spot as the world’s richest person to Bernard Arnault, the Chairman and CEO of French luxury conglomerate, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
According to the Forbes real-time billionaires list, Bernard Arnault and family are now worth $191 billion while Musk is worth $174.9 billion.
Musk has held the position on the top of the list since September 2021, when he first overtook Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos.
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The drop in Musk’s wealth can be attributed to the drastic reduction in the price of Tesla stocks seeing as he owns 25% of the company. Prices of Tesla shares have reduced by almost half partially due to the expedited sale of shares which Musk carried out to finance his Twitter acquisition.
Musk had first lost the top spot briefly last week Wednesday following a deep plunge in the value of Tesla stock. His net-worth first dropped below $200 billion back in November as investors sold their Tesla shares due to worries that Musk was too preoccupied with running Twitter.
Who is Bernard Arnault?
Here are 7 quick facts about the current world’s richest person and his company LVMH:
- The 73-year-old businessman is the Chairman and CEO of French luxury empire, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which owns 70 luxury fashion and retail brands.
Some notable brands owned/partly owned by the company include; Dom Perignon, Givenchy, Fendi, Fenty Beauty by Rihanna, Bulgari and Sephora. - Bernard Arnault began his business using a $15 million loan from his father’s construction business to buy Christian Dior in 1985.
- Four of Arnault’s five children work in different arms of the empire.
- Every Saturday, Arnault visits about 25 different stores, some of his and some of his competitors.
- The 70 brands owned by LVMH are split into 26 wine houses, 14 Fashion & Leather goods houses, 15 Perfume & Cosmetics houses, 8 Watch & Jewellry houses, 5 Selective Retailing houses and 10 houses which represent ‘other activities’. Brands under ‘other activities’ include French magazine, Le Parisien and hospitality company, Belmond which operates 35 deluxe hotels, restaurants in 22 countries, 7 tourist trains and 3 river cruises.
- LVMH holds the record for the biggest luxury brand purchase in history, after acquiring Tiffany and Co for $15.8 billion in January 2021.
- The oldest brand owned by LVMH is Clos Des Lambrays, a wine house established in 1365. Of its 70 brands, the company only owns 6 brands younger than 5 years old.