If Bernard Arnault’s family were a TV show, last weekend would have been the midseason twist: the 77-year-old LVMH chairman joined X for the first time in his life—not to sell handbags, but to insist his five children aren’t fighting over who inherits his empire.
The occasion was the conclusion of Le Monde‘s six-part investigation by French journalists Raphaëlle Bacqué and Vanessa Schneider, capped by a final installment alleging a deep rivalry to succeed Arnault among his children Delphine, and Antoine, from his first marriage, and Alexandre, Frédéric, and Jean, from his second.
“My children run Houses, build teams, make decisions, and—sacrilege—call each other on Sundays,” Arnault wrote in an extraordinary open letter that racked up 4.5 million views in 24 hours. “What, in an ordinary family, is called a Sunday is called, in ours, an intrigue.”
But LVMH’s own latest earnings filing, published two days later, tells a stranger story than the Le Monde investigation—and it has nothing to do with Sunday phone calls. In the empire often dubbed the real-life Succession, the best-performing business right now isn’t run by any of the five heirs at all.
LVMH’s highest-performing segment isn’t run by any of the Arnault siblings
