Bernard Arnault’s Fortune Plummeted by $20 Billion This Year
You win some, you lose some.
LVMH CEO and chairman Bernard Arnault has taken a hit in the wealth department compared to his high-earning counterparts. The Frenchman’s fortune plummeted by a whopping $20 billion this year, the biggest loss of any billionaire in 2024, Bloomberg reported. The decline has brought his net worth down to $187 billion, and he now sits in third behind Jeff Bezos and frontrunner Elon Musk on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks the world’s 500 wealthiest people.
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Musk, who’s currently the richest person in the world, also experienced a significant decrease in his net worth on Wednesday. The Tesla cofounder’s fortune plunged a staggering $21.7 billion in a single day. However, he’s still worth an eye-watering $240.5 billion and is up $11.5 billion for the year despite facing one of the largest market-driven drops in the history of Bloomberg’s wealth index.
In second position, as previously mentioned, is Bezos. The Amazon founder is only $37 billion behind Musk with a net worth of $204 billion. At the same time, China’s richest man, Zhong Shanshan ($54.8 billion), could be dethroned following a $13 billion loss.
Arnault’s decline comes amid a slowdown in demand for luxury goods, especially in China. LVMH recorded a 14 percent slump in sales in Asia (excluding Japan) in the second quarter. For context, that’s a 6 percent slip compared to Q1 sales. Arnault’s conglomerate also noted that its overall revenue growth had dipped 1 percent year-on-year in the first six months of 2024.
“The results for the first half of the year reflect LVMH’s remarkable resilience, backed by the strength of its Maisons and the responsiveness of its teams in a climate of economic and geopolitical uncertainty,” Arnault said in a statement.
LVMH’s rival, Kering, founded by François Pinault, has also been struggling. Earlier this week, the luxury conglomerate—which owns Gucci, Boucheron, and Saint Laurent, among others—estimated that its operating profit could drop approximately 30 percent in the second half of the year, after falling 42 percent in the first six months.
“There was a deterioration of the trends in June that so far are persisting in July,” Jean-Marc Duplaix, deputy chief executive officer in charge of operations and finance at Kering, told WWD. “In this very volatile environment, it’s very difficult to predict what will happen in August and September, so I won’t predict anything when it comes to the trends for the rest of the quarter.”
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