French man, Bernard Arnault (75) has been named the world’s richest man of 2024 with an estimated fortune of $233billion, according to Forbes April billionaires list.
Benard Arnault is the head of the luxury goods giant LVMH, which includes the likes of Louis Vuitton and Dior.
Arnault has grown his empire, known as Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, or just LVMH, to include around 75 luxury brands under about 60 different subsidiaries, cementing himself as one of the world’s wealthiest business moguls.
His aggressive business strategies earned him the nickname “The Terminator,” as he revitalized Dior and sold off other assets for profit. In 1987, he played a key role in the creation of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), a global company in luxury goods, by merging Louis Vuitton with Moët Hennessy.
According to Forbes Arnault is the first Frenchman to top the world ranking after having moved up from third place in 2022.
According to Forbes Jeff Bezos (60), the founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, becomes second with $198.4 billion worth of wealth.
He is followed in third place by Elon Musk, who has $195.3 billion in wealth. Through March 2024, Musk and Bezos have been fluctuating between second and third place due to changing stock prices for Amazon and Tesla.
Musk (52) co-founded Tesla, SpaceX and also owns X (formerly Twitter).
Others are Mark Zuckerberg (39) of Meta, Larry Ellison (79) of Oracle, Warren Buffett (93) of Berkshire Hathaway, Bill Gates (68) of Microsoft and Larry Page of Google (51) complete the top eight roundup of most wealthy people in the world. In ninth and tenth place comes Steve Ballmer (68), the former CEO of Microsoft, and Sergey Brin (50), the co-founder of Google.
