Bernard Arnault, the 77-year-old billionaire founder and CEO of LVMH, rarely sits for long interviews. “Why give out information?” he joked when Guillaume Pley, the host of the French podcast “LEGEND,” brought up how little is known about him.
In a rare conversation running over an hour and a half, released earlier this month, the man behind Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co. opened up about everything from advising Steve Jobs to a surreal dinner with Donald Trump.
Here are the five most interesting takeaways.
1. Steve Jobs asked him for advice on Apple’s stores, then told him Dom Perignon would outlast the iPhone
Arnault said Jobs approached him when Apple was launching its retail stores, at a time when “nobody in the technology business” sold its own products in boutiques.
“We told him: if you want to make beautiful stores, come and see what Vuitton is doing,” Arnault said, adding that Apple sent someone to study the brand’s boutiques and that he advised Jobs to put Apple Stores in the same prime locations as Louis Vuitton, including a flagship spot on Tokyo’s Ginza that he said still draws crowds today.
The last time the two men met, Arnault recalled, Jobs paid him a compliment that stuck with him: “You know, my phone is great — but what you do is even better, because I’m convinced that in a century, your Dom Perignon will still be here, and my phone will be completely obsolete.”
2. His investing regret: dumping a near-20% stake in Netflix too early
Arnault, who is today the 9th-richest person in the world, revealed that his family investment team was an early backer of Netflix, holding what he said was almost 20% of the company. The position was a big winner, but not nearly as big as it could have been.
“I sold too early,” he said, estimating the stake would be worth 10 times more today.
He also described a stroke of pure luck from the dot-com bust: a dissolved American venture fund he’d invested in mailed him its remaining assets: a “good bundle” of Google shares, he said, that were then worth around 2 or 3 euros each.
“At the time, we didn’t really know what it was,” he said. “It was a good deal we had absolutely nothing to do with.”
3. How he raised billionaire kids who still show up to work
All five of Arnault’s children hold senior roles across LVMH, and he was candid about how involved he was in that outcome.
He said he brought his children into the business early, walking them through his deals and investments, and setting a clear condition: “I told them: if you one day want to take part in all this, in one way or another, you absolutely need to study hard — because otherwise, it’s not possible.”
He contrasted that with what he saw among other wealthy families, where children of fortune spend their time “buying big cars” and partying.
He also got hands-on. When one of his sons struggled with math before his baccalauréat, the French high school exams, Arnault said, “I would come home at 6 p.m. to help him with his math problems.”
As for their futures at the company, Arnault insisted the same rules apply to everyone: “We progress, at LVMH, through a system of meritocracy.”
4. His business advice? Forget marketing, perfect the product, and persevere
Asked whether he gets involved in the creative side of LVMH’s 75-plus houses, Arnault said he did, “I have a certain aptitude, I believe, for seeing what will work.”
That instinct extends all the way to the shop floor. Arnault said that when he visits a store, “I can clearly see what might need improving.” He said he jokes to his Paris store managers that they should hire him as “director of visual merchandising” because he makes changes on a visit, returns the following week, and, by his telling, is told the boutique is performing better.
Arnault said long-term success in his business comes down to one thing: the quality of the product. He said he once told Louis Vuitton’s own marketing department that a true luxury house shouldn’t do marketing at all.
“You must not do marketing. You must create, and it’s your products that must impose themselves,” he said on the podcast.
Pressed at the end of the interview for the single indispensable quality for lasting in business, his answer was simple: “I think you have to be persevering.”
5. He had dinner with Trump on the day of the second assassination attempt and found him ‘totally relaxed’
Arnault, who says he met Donald Trump when they both were in real estate in 1980s New York, recounted a surreal evening with the president.
Driving to a planned dinner at Trump’s home with his son Alexandre, Arnault heard on the radio that the Secret Service had found an armed man near Trump’s golf course, the second apparent attempt on his life, after the rally shooting that grazed his ear.
“I said, ‘Alexandre, it’s over. The dinner is off,” Arnault recalled. Instead, the dinner went ahead. When the Arnaults told him how terrible the afternoon’s events were, Trump reportedly waved it off and said, “2-0,” and was “totally relaxed.”
Arnault also offered a glimpse of how he interacts with Trump on trade, saying he lobbies him directly on tariffs: “I don’t always get what I ask for, but I discuss.” During Trump’s first term, he said that approach secured an exemption for French wines and spirits.
