Despite its repute for top taxes and a powerful union motion, France nonetheless has dozens of billionaires.
As of 2025, France was house to 53 of the world’s billionaires, coming in eleventh place for international locations with essentially the most billionaires, in line with the World Population Review.
France fell behind the UK, which is in tenth place with 55 billionaires, and forward of Taiwan with 51 billionaires.
The high three international locations (additionally the world’s most populous international locations) are; the United States (813 billionaires), China (406), and India (200). France’s neighbours, Italy and Germany, had been additionally house to extra billionaires, with 73 and 132, respectively.
As France weighs instituting a brand new tax on the tremendous rich, The Local seems to be on the nation’s home-grown billionaires.
READ MORE: Explained: France’s proposed ‘Zucman tax’ on the super-rich
Who are France’s wealthiest billionaires?
Measuring wealth isn’t at all times the best job – billionaires’ internet value can change drastically in brief intervals of time, as their property are sometimes tied up in firm inventory costs, which fluctuate, and a few of the world’s richest persons are fairly coy about their internet value.
For this text, we have used the Forbes enterprise rating, which updates every day.
1 Bernard Arnault and household – According to Forbes’ official 2025 billionaires checklist, LVMH’s Bernard Arnault (and household) took the highest slot with a internet value of $178 billion.
Arnault was the one French billionaire to make the highest 10 worldwide checklist, coming in fifth place, behind Oracle’s Larry Ellison and forward of investor Warren Buffett.
Arnault was briefly the world’s richest individual in 2022, overtaking Elon Musk when Musk was busy tanking Tesla’s share worth.
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He took over his father’s development firm and diversified into luxurious manufacturers, creating the powerhouse that’s now LVMH – born out of the merger in 1987 of trunk-maker Louis Vuitton and the wines and spirits group Moet Hennessy.
READ MORE: Who is France’s luxurious emperor Bernard Arnault?
2 Françoise Bettencourt Meyers and household – Granddaughter of the founding father of L’Oréal, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers (and household), took second place within the checklist of France’s billionaires with a internet value of $81.6 billion.
Meyers is the second-wealthiest girl on the earth, behind Walmart heiress Alice Walton.
She inherited her wealth from her mom, Liliane Bettencourt, who died in 2017. Liliane was the one youngster of Eugène Schueller, who based L’Oréal – a chemist from Alsace, Schueller, started his profession in Paris after he was requested to develop a brand new hair dye in 1904.
Schueller was a Nazi sympathiser and a member of La Cagoule, a violent pro-fascist organisation that supported the Vichy regime. Schueller’s son-in-law, André Bettencourt (partner of Liliane and father of Françoise), was additionally a member, however he later switched sides to affix the French resistance towards the tip of the struggle.
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3 Alain and Gerard Wertheimer – The Wertheimer brothers tied for third place, every with a internet value of $36 billion. Together, they personal the posh model Chanel.
The brothers inherited their wealth because the grandsons of Pierre Wertheimer, the co-founder of the Chanel fragrance firm. Pierre and his brother, Paul, collaborated with Coco Chanel to create the well-known fragrance, Chanel No. 5 in 1921.
The enterprise association meant that Coco Chanel would solely retain a small share of the fragrance, permitting the Wertheimers to run the model.
However, Chanel was sad with the association and spent years suing for possession. The Wertheimers had been Jewish, which meant their property and companies might be seized by the Nazis. Chanel tried to regain management presently. She was unsuccessful, discovering that the brothers had quickly transferred possession to a Christian good friend, who gave Parfum Chanel again to them after the struggle.
5 Emmanuel Besnier – With an estimated internet value of $24.5 billion, Emmanuel Besnier took fifth place as the primary shareholder of the family-held firm Lactalis, which is the world’s largest dairy merchandise group.
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Lactalis can also be France’s second-largest meals product group, behind Danone, and it owns quite a lot of different manufacturers, reminiscent of Kraft Natural Cheese and Stonyfield Farm. Several French billionaires are related to the Besnier household.
Emmanuel took over as head of the Lactalis group in 2000, after his father, Michel Besnier, died of a coronary heart assault.
As for the origins of the model, it was Emmanuel’s grandfather, André Besnier, who initially based a small cheese-making firm in 1933 in Laval, south-west France. Upon André’s demise in 1955, he left his firm of fifty individuals to his son Michel.
It was Michel who grew Lactalis into the main dairy conglomerate of the EU. Lactalis notably launched the Président model of Camembert in 1968, and in 1990, it acquired the influential French dairy group, Group Bridel.
6 François Pinault and household – As ‘honorary chairman’ and co-founder of the posh group Kering – named as a reference to the Breton phrase ‘Ker’, that means house or fireplace – François Pinault is value $21.7 billion. Kering owns the style manufacturers Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Gucci and Balenciaga.
Pinault, aged 89, is initially from Brittany and began off working in his father’s timber enterprise. He specialised in timber buying and selling within the Nineteen Sixties and finally grew his enterprise into a number one timber dealer in France by the Nineteen Eighties. In the late Nineteen Eighties, Pinault started investing within the retail sector.
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He additionally based the funding holding firm Artemis, which his son, François-Henri Pinault (married to Selma Hayek), is the president of, along with being chairman of Kering.
7 Laurent Dassault, Thierry Dassault and Marie-Hélène Habert-Dassault – Each value $10.6 billion, the three Dassault kids inherited a good portion of the Dassault aerospace and software program fortune when their father Serge Dassault died in 2018. They are additionally concerned within the operating of the Dassault Group.
Serge additionally had a fourth youngster, Olivier Dassault, who died in a airplane crash in 2021. His fortune was left to his three kids and his widow, Natacha Nikolajevic. Olivier additionally served as an MP for the right-wing Les Républicains celebration.
Serge took over as CEO of Avions Marcel Dassault after the demise of his father, Marcel Bloch, who began the plane firm in 1928.
The firm grew in the course of the inter-war interval, however throughout World War II, France’s aviation trade was largely dismantled, save for work required by Nazi Germany. As a Jewish man, Marcel refused to collaborate with the Nazis and was imprisoned and later despatched to the Buchenwald focus camp.
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After the struggle, Marcel transformed to Catholicism and adjusted the household’s identify to Dassault, a reference to his brother’s nom de guerre as a fighter within the French Resistance.
Notably, the Rafale fighter jet was designed and constructed by Dassault Aviation. The Dassault household additionally owns the French every day Le Figaro.
7 Xavier Niel and household – Also value $10.6 billion, just like the Dassault siblings, Xavier Niel owns the telecommunications firm Iliad, which is the mum or dad firm of web service supplier Free.
Unlike most of the different French billionaires, Xavier Niel made his personal cash.
Niel grew to become interested by telecommunication at an early age, and apparently received in hassle with the police for hacking Canal+ decoders. He alleges that he briefly supplied assist with espionage for French intelligence providers, and even accessed the telephone information of former president François Mitterrand.
At 19, he created and offered a ‘Minitel rose service’, principally a enterprise offering a precursor to web intercourse chat and erotica through Minitel, itself a precursor to the web. He grew to become a millionaire by age 24, and within the Nineteen Nineties, he invested in web service suppliers. In 1999, he created Free, the web supplier.
Recently, he was a seed investor in France’s Mistral AI, and he created the free tech and coding college École 42 in 2013. He was awarded the French Légion d’honneur in 2022.
11 Vincent Bolloré and household – Seen in some circles as France’s Rupert Murdoch, Vincent Bolloré, the son of industrialist Michel Bolloré and Monqiue Follot (herself the daughter of industrialists), is value $10.3 billion.
He ran the household conglomerate, the Bolloré Group, till 2022, when he retired. The Bolloré Group was initially based in 1822 as a paper producer named Papeteries d’Odet, which primarily produced cigarette wrappers and Bibles.
A former funding banker, Bolloré took over the household firm when it was on the point of collapse within the 1981, managing to safe funding and finally flip a revenue by 1984.
In the Nineteen Nineties, Bolloré invested in transport and logistics, and within the 2000s, he started investing in media and communications. Nowadays, the worldwide conglomerate is run by Bolloré’s son, Cyrille.
A Catholic and conservative, Bolloré additionally owns a number of right-wing and far-right media shops in France, and he just lately acquired the weekly Journal du Dimanche.
READ MORE: OPINION: French media dangers changing into a political playground for billionaires
