If you scroll through the first 10 or so pages of Google results for the charitable giving of the world’s on- and off-again wealthiest man, Bernard Arnault, you’ll find … practically nothing.
The most high-profile things that do come up when searching for evidence of the generosity of the founder and CEO of the French luxury goods behemoth LVMH look more like acts of billionaire one-upmanship. LVMH paid for the architecturally stunning Fondation Louis Vuitton museum, which showcases Arnault’s collection of modern art. The rival billionaire owner of the luxury brands group Kering, François Pinault, has his private collection of contemporary art on display in the Bourse de Commerce in Paris’s 1st arrondissement. Arnault’s €200m pledge towards the reconstruction of Notre Dame came just after Pinault pledged €100m.
In fact, as far as donations published on the internet go, Arnault’s largest charitable donation seems to have been to his children.
The rest – you’ll find a smattering of giving unrelated to art acquisition here and there – is a mere fraction of Arnault’s $196bn net worth.
When I reached out to a spokesperson for Arnault, they said he did not disclose his personal giving. But they brought my attention to donations made by LVMH, including €10m to fight forest fires in the Amazon, €20m to French public hospitals and €5m to the Institut Pasteur de Lille during Covid, €2m to the Chinese Red Cross, €5m to the Ukrainian Red Cross, and €1m for flood relief in Italy, as well as in-kind donations by producing hand sanitiser and masks to relieve France’s Covid shortages.
If this is indeed Arnault channelling his own giving through his company, then in percentage terms, this roughly €45m is like an average French household (in a country where the median net wealth is €124,800) giving about €25 to their dearest causes. Or, if you add in the €43m from LVMH to help the Musée d’Orsay acquire a painting by Gustave Caillebotte this year, then that average family dug deep and gave about €50. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s not missing a zero.
Considered purely as a business, LVMH lists numerous non-profits as “stakeholders”. But its latest annual report, while long on its commitment to environmental and social responsibility, offers few details as to the actual amount of financial support it has provided to them. It includes employee and client donations in the $57m it says its “maisons” contributed in charitable giving. Or put another way, 0.4% of the $14.1bn in net profit LVMH made last year.
So, yes, perhaps Arnault is secretly far more generous, and merely abiding by the biblical maxim to not let the left hand know what the right is doing. Or perhaps, as the French business magazine Challenges pointed out in 2020, France’s ultra-wealthy citizens – the country is home to one of the two richest men in the world and the richest woman, the l’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers (around $89bn) – are just far less charitable than some of their foreign counterparts (who, to be fair, often use philanthropy as a means to offset their taxes).
They’re also less visible. Of course, Arnault’s vast wealth is no secret in his home country, and he’s no stranger to those in power. But even though the wildly successful LVMH sells some of the most coveted products in the world, it has no corresponding fanboys like the ones who trail Tesla. Indeed, American billionaires often figure more prominently in popular conversation in France – actually, you could extend this to all of Europe – than France’s own.
There are also few headlines extolling mammoth donations to endow university departments or professorships, no high-profile or generous French equivalents of the privately funded Watson Fellowship or MacArthur genius grant. No ubiquity of donor names on hospital wings, no “Arnault Global Initiative”. (I would be remiss not to mention that the French state is more willing to do these things via tax policy than its counterparts in the English-speaking world have been.)
I can’t help but wonder: why, in France, a society so sensitive to questions of wealth and economic justice, is there so little clamour for Arnault and other French billionaires to be seen to be doing more?
That the country’s super-rich would seek to maintain a low profile is understandable: wealth in France is looked at with greater suspicion than in the US or UK. All the above would be far more likely to elicit responses of “is this democratically legitimate?”, or “what influence will they wield over the university as a result?”, or “why do they have all this money in the first place? Maybe they shouldn’t”.
These are all legitimate questions. Perhaps Arnault shouldn’t have so much money to begin with. Perhaps billionaires shouldn’t in effect control access to outer space, or – at least in the case of the US – be able to flood politics with immeasurable amounts of secret money. Extreme inequality threatens the stability and integrity of institutions of democracy. Perhaps, as someone once said, after a rich person reaches $1bn, we should build them a monument, declare them official winners of capitalism and apply a 100% tax rate to the rest.
But in the world as it is, Arnault’s vast private wealth does exist. And even if Arnault and LVMH pay their fair share in taxes (though recent research from France shows that ultra-wealthy people on average pay less by percentage than the merely wealthy), employ many people, and – and I do mean this – constitute an enormous economic success for France, it’s not enough. Not when one’s assets amount to the GDP of a small country. It’s not enough. It’s also more than just a French problem – it’s a global one.
Let me be clear: billionaires are not the solution to the climate emergency or biodiversity loss. But the concentration of wealth in their hands could go a long way in accelerating the transition to green energy and addressing gaps in climate finance. And private funds have a certain type of freedom to manoeuvre and take risks (such as funding climate litigation) that governments often lack.
Jeff Bezos, who recently launched his new $500m yacht, has for years faced criticism for not giving more of his wealth away. But at least he was shamed into devoting $10bn to global environmental efforts. (MacKenzie Scott – who became one of the richest people in the world after divorcing Bezos – has effectively supplemented the rest of his “should-be” giving for him). Elon Musk, through his erratic use of Twitter to boost far-right trolls, presents his own type of challenge to democratic society. But at the very least, Tesla kickstarted the shift away from the internal combustion engine and towards the electric car and distributed solar panels and battery storage.
And of course Bill Gates was the original problem billionaire, but after years of public haranguing he dedicated himself to things other than his own personal consumption and passing absurd levels of wealth to his children. He and Warren Buffett even coaxed fellow mega-billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg and Larry Ellison into joining their Giving Pledge to divest at least half of their net worth before or upon their deaths. Some take their social responsibilities even more seriously, such as the Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who placed the clothing company in a trust with the profits destined to fight climate breakdown.
When it comes to Arnault, though, sometimes those in France who would naturally be critical seem as if they would rather wish him away than press him to, or perhaps even see him, publicly direct his wealth to philanthropy other than art. While that might be understandable, the end result is unacceptable – not merely for France, but also for Europe and the world more broadly. The climate and biodiversity crises are too urgent and too severe for him to sit atop his hoard of wealth like the dragon Smaug in Middle Earth’s Lonely Mountain, secreted away from the impact it might yet have.
We hear time and again from defenders of the system that has allowed such ludicrous concentration of wealth into so few hands that it is necessary for investment. So where is Arnault’s venture fund funnelling cash to carbon removal using geothermal energy in Iceland, or to next-generation lithium-free batteries, or just simply buying up land to protect it? Perhaps even strategically located land that chokes off access for mining, logging or drilling projects in old-growth forests and rainforests.
There are some who will howl with fury at that last idea, but the one place where private wealth produced a public good we now take for granted is art collections and their display in museums. That’s something Arnault grasps, and so maybe that’s a natural place for him to start. In the same way that he might buy art for display to the public later on, he could buy land to gift back to governments as natural reserves.
And if he needs some external motivation, maybe this will work: Hey François Pinault, are you listening?
Alexander Hurst is a France-based writer and adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute for Political Studies
