Bernard Arnault Full Q&A Oxford Union (YouTube screen capture)
Bernard Arnault only recently rose to the status of richest man in the world. He leap frogged Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and all the rest when his fashion company, LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton, saw its stock skyrocket in value. Now Calcalist reports that the Bernard Arnault, who Forbes says is worth more than $186 billion, was once of the investors in Israel’s cybersecurity startup Wiz which offers cloud computing services.
Wiz recently closed a $120 million round of funding led by Salesforce Ventures and Blackstone. There is no word yet as to how much money Bernard Arnault personally invested in Wiz.
Wiz states that it delivers the first cloud visibility solution for enterprise security, offering a “360° view of security risks across clouds, containers and workloads. No agents. No sidecars.”
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Wiz was founded a little over one year ago by Assaf Rapaport, former manager of R&D at Microsoft Israel which built the security stack in Azure, Ami Luttwak Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik. Rapaport and his team in Israel founded Adollam, which was sold to Microsoft in 2015 for $320 million.
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Bernard Arnault is Chairman and CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton, the world’s leading luxury products group. His personal wealth increased by more than $110 billion in a little over a year’s time, going from $76 billion in March 2020 to $186.3 this May. His LVMH, which also owns household names like Fendi, Christian Dior and Givenchy, saw an unprecedented rise in its stock price during the Covid 19 crisis.
According to his official company bio, Bernard Arnault was born to an industrial family in Roubaix, France on March 5, 1949, Mr. Arnault attended the Roubaix lycée and the Faidherbe lycée in Lille. He then went on to study at the Ecole Polytechnique.
He began his professional career that year as an engineer with the Ferret-Savinel construction company and successively was promoted to various executive management positions before becoming Chairman in 1978.
Mr. Arnault remained there until 1984, when he undertook the reorganization of the Financière Agache holding company. He returned the group to profitability as he embarked upon a strategy of developing the world’s leading luxury products company. In the process, he reinvigorated Christian Dior as the cornerstone of the new organization.
In 1989, Mr. Arnault became the majority shareholder of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton, creating the world’s leading luxury products group. Mr. Arnault has been Chairman and CEO of the company since that date.
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Mr. Arnault is also President of the Board of Directors of Groupe Arnault S.E. (his family holding company).
Mr. Arnault is married and has five children. He has been awarded the honorary titles of Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
