LVMH’s Bernard Arnault Is Big on Family, Not Fond of ‘Luxury’ and Ready to Go 250km an Hour
The often quiet CEO opened up in a rare extended interview on the Legend podcast with Guillaume Pley.
FAMILY AFFAIR: Bernard Arnault only rarely speaks at length publicly, preferring instead to stay heads down running LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
But when Arnault sat down for a rare extended interview with Guillaume Pley on his popular YouTube and podcast channel Legend, the luxury titan was in a mood to open up.
Over an hour and 40 minutes, he dug into his childhood, his parenting philosophy, his long friendship with U.S. President Donald Trump and, of course, luxury, although he doesn’t like the term even as it has defined the billionaire’s work life.
“Luxury is not a word I am fond of particularly,” Arnault said, according to a translation of the interview, which was conducted in French. “It’s often associated somewhat pejoratively with aspects that have nothing to do with our business. Frivolity, superficiality, uselessness, all that flashy bling.”
Instead, he said LVMH leads in the sector of “high-quality products” that come together through a series of “highly specialized artisanal crafts.”
Arnault, who built LVMH into a luxury powerhouse whether he likes the word or not, stressed the importance of family, remembering what he learned about businesses from his grandfather and father and how he passed those lessons on to his own kids and now has grandkids of his own.
He spoke with particular fondness of his relationship with his grandfather.
“He died on June 26, 1959, and he had always paid close attention to my schooling,” Arnault recalled. “He was very happy to see that I was doing well in school. And so I had received my grades, which were good, and I put them in his coffin.
“My grandfather, he taught me a great deal whenever I went along with him to the various construction sites to see the site managers and to talk with the workers,” he said.
In turn, Arnault showed his own children — now executives in the business — “exactly what a company was” at a very young age.
“I would talk to them about how I ran the business and they followed along with all the different paths we took,” he said.
Learning about business from dad has taken the Arnault brood around the world and into some singular situations.
For instance, Arnault and his son Alexandre were due to have dinner with Trump in September 2024, the day the-then presidential candidate’s security thwarted an assassination attempt, the second in just nine weeks.
Arnault was sure the dinner would be canceled, but it wasn’t.
“We sit down with him and say, ‘It’s terrible what happened this afternoon.’ And he replies, ‘Two to zero,’” he recalled, adding that Trump was “totally relaxed” and that they stayed until 11 p.m.
Arnault also opened a window into his many adventures as chief executive officer, from going over past takeover battles to getting up close with Formula 1 racing.
Before a grand prix in Monaco, former world champion Max Verstappen took the 77-year-old for a spin around the track — “the day before the race at 250 kilometers per hour, through the streets of Monaco.”
“I can tell you, it’s something you remember,” he said. “Well, Verstappen was driving, so I told myself the risk is limited.”