Turns Out France Has an Oligarch Problem Too

Le Monde relates the adventures of Bernard Arnault, ninth-richest human on the planet.

As recently as 1957, it was news when an American, the oil man H.L. Hunt, ranked among the five richest people on earth. In those days, the only path to that kind of wealth was oil, and the other four richest people were all Mideast monarchs: King Saud of Saudi Arabia; Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salim Al-Sabah of Kuwait; Sheikh Ali Bin Abdullah Al Thani of Qatar; and the last Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan (who’d lost his royal title in 1948 when Hyderabad was absorbed into India with the end of the British Raj).

Today it’s quite different. The five richest people on earth, according to Forbes, are all tech bros—Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Dell—and they’re all American. Royalty no longer figures. The world’s richest monarch, King Maha Vajiralongkorn of Thailand (net worth: $45 billion), would just barely make the top 50 if Forbes bothered to include royals in its billionaire tally, which it doesn’t. Too small-time! In the 1990s the Sultan of Brunei (since 1967, Hassanal Bolkiah Muiz’zaddin Wad’daulah) was the world’s richest person. Today he’s the world’s second-richest monarch after Thailand’s, with a net worth of $30 billion, an amount that would rank him a pitiful 79th in the Forbes tally, right after the ex-wives of Bezos and Bill Gates. (It was Gates who displaced Brunei’s Sultan.)

If we tend today to speak of the American oligarchy and the global oligarchy as one and the same, that’s because mostly they are. Great political power no longer propels you to the top of the Forbes billionaire rankings (though President Donald Trump is giving it the old college try). Did I say the five richest people in earth are all American tech tycoons? You might almost say the same of the top 10. But there’s one exception—a foreigner who is not in tech, not in oil, and not of royal blood. He is the ninth-richest person in the world (net worth: $142.7 billion), and a couple of years ago he was the richest. Now he’s just the richest person in Europe, leaving its crowned heads in the dust. Most Americans have never heard of him.

I’m speaking of the Frenchman Bernard Arnault, founder and CEO of LVMH. Arnault got rich selling........

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