Elon Musk dethroned: who is now the richest man in the world
Created: 2022-12-15, 3:12 p.m
By: Patricia Huber
With the purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk's fortune has shrunk considerably.
Now a Frenchman is at the head of the super-rich.
Paris/New York – Elon Musk is no longer the richest person in the world.
French luxury magnate Bernard Arnault has overtaken Twitter and Tesla bosses in the daily updated rankings of the estimated wealth of the super-rich.
Both at
Bloomberg Billionaires
and
Forbes
, the northern Frenchman pushed the tech billionaire Musk from first place.
Bernard Arnault: How did he become so rich?
Arnault's fortune was estimated by
Bloomberg
on Wednesday at $171 billion (160.9 billion euros),
Forbes
last snapshot at $191 billion.
But who is Arnault and what made him so rich?
The 73-year-old entrepreneur is best known as the chairman of French luxury empire LVMH, which includes fashion brands like Dior and Louis Vuitton and champagne brands like Moët & Chandon.
Arnault was born in 1949 into an industrial family in Roubaix, in northern France, not far from the Belgian border.
His father and grandfather involved him in the family business early on, and later the engineer, who was trained at the renowned École Polytechnique, took over the business from his father.
Louis Vuitton, Dior, Moët & Chandon: luxury made Arnault a billionaire
In the 1980s, the switch to luxury: Arnault joins the struggling designer label Christian Dior and becomes the majority shareholder of the luxury goods group LVMH.
He is expanding the group and, according to his own statement, was initially criticized for the idea of brand grouping.
But for the French it turns out to be a success.
LVMH is now a giant in the luxury segment and one of the most valuable groups in Europe across all sectors.
Arnault tries to keep trying new things with the LVMH core brand Louis Vuitton.
Louis Vuitton is an innovative brand, he told
Le Figaro
newspaper .
"Creation must always innovate and surprise, while continuity is maintained thanks to historical products." The crises of recent years have also left many manufacturers of luxury goods untouched.
LVMH reported a 28 percent increase in sales for the first nine months of the year.
French billionaire Bernard Arnault has replaced Elon Musk as the world's richest person.
© IMAGO/UPI Photo/IP3press
Elon Musk: Twitter purchase caused assets to shrink sharply
But Arnault and his family, to whom the father of five children has now transferred considerable parts of LVMH according to
Le Monde
, benefited above all from Musk's current decline in wealth in the ranking of the super-rich.
Bloomberg
estimates
that since January it has shrunk by more than $100 billion to $164 billion most recently.
Reason is, among other things, the purchase of the short message service Twitter.
The share price of the electric car manufacturer Tesla has also fallen significantly this year.
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The duel between Musk and Arnault for the title of the richest person in the world is likely to continue.
The reason: the inaccurate and sometimes controversial asset estimates are mostly based on publicly available information on assets such as real estate, art objects, other luxury goods - and stocks.
And as is well known, their courses sometimes change quickly.
(ph/dpa)