Bernard Arnault’s children run a good part of LVMH, share equally in the partnership at the top of it and mostly sit on its board, yet the group has named none of them his successor.
Bernard Arnault has five children, and the arrangement he has built around them is more interesting than any of the gossip about it. Forbes put his fortune at about $142.4bn on 27 July 2026. Two of the children come from his first marriage and three, as Fortune put it when summarising Le Monde, from his second. All five work in the business. The eldest was born in 1975 and the youngest in 1998, which puts twenty-three years between them, the same span as Delphine’s time on the LVMH board. Their birth order is, near enough, the order in which they reached the boardroom: Delphine in 2003, Antoine in 2006, Alexandre and Frédéric together in 2024, and Jean not yet. The gap in the middle is the telling part. Eighteen years passed between the second Arnault seat and the third, long enough for the younger sons to grow up, go to work and be given something to run before they were given a vote. LVMH has said that a succession plan exists and has declined to publish it, so the clearest guide to the Arnault children and LVMH succession is what each of them already runs.
Delphine Arnault, the eldest, runs Christian Dior Couture
Delphine was born on 4 April 1975 and was the first of the five into the boardroom, which she reached in her late twenties. Her apprenticeship ran through Louis Vuitton, where in 2013 she became executive vice president in charge of all product-related activities, which at Louis Vuitton covers rather a lot of leather. Since 1 February 2023 she has been chairman and chief executive of Christian Dior Couture, and LVMH’s own page on her lists her as a member of both the board and the executive committee. She was 47 when she took over the house, and had by then sat on the group’s board for twenty years. In her case the vote came long before the brand, and the brand is the job the outside world reads as the signal.
The family’s affairs contain two Christian Diors, which has long made the financial pages harder going than they need to be. Delphine’s makes the clothes. The other, Christian Dior SE, is a holding company in the chain that controls LVMH, and under a plan announced in September 2026 it is to be renamed Agache SCA. Anyone who has tried to follow the Arnault holdings through a newspaper will welcome the change, since it leaves only one Dior that sells anything. In a family where the holding companies have couture names, the couture house is the easy part.
Antoine Arnault minds LVMH’s image and the family’s football
Antoine, born in 1977, is the eldest son, and he followed his sister on to the board in 2006, at 29. By 2026 he has sat at that table for two decades, longer than three of his siblings have been in the business at all. He has spent much of his career on the part of the business that cannot be put in a carrier bag. A 2024 report described him as head of communications, image and environment for LVMH, and also as chairman and chief executive of Christian Dior SE, the holding company that the September 2026 plan is to rename. If that report still holds, the son charged with how the group is seen is also the one chairing the company through which the family holds it. The two jobs sit well together. The public face of LVMH and the legal spine of the family’s control end up on the same desk.
He has a further brief that matters more in Paris than in most capitals: he was named as Agache’s future representative on the board of Paris FC, which gives a family better known for champagne and trunks a football club to worry about on Saturdays. It is the one Arnault interest that plays in front of a crowd every week and publishes its results by the final whistle. Every dynasty needs someone who can explain it to the newspapers, and the Arnaults have kept the job in the family.
Alexandre Arnault has a seat at Nike as well as LVMH
Alexandre, born in 1992 and 34 by Fortune’s count, is the eldest of the three sons from the second marriage. He arrived at Tiffany & Co. in January 2021, not long after LVMH bought it, which put the newest acquisition in the hands of the family’s newest generation. Business Chief reported that he was due to move to Moët Hennessy as deputy chief in February 2025, after three years at the jeweller. In September 2026 Fortune described him as helping to run the group’s wines and spirits, so the move from blue boxes to bottles appears to have happened. He joined the LVMH board in April 2024.
On 17 September 2026 he announced that he was joining Nike’s board of directors, an appointment that people elsewhere in the luxury trade will have read twice. Nike sits wholly outside LVMH, and the seat is the first role in this piece that no Arnault owns. Fortune, reporting the Nike seat, put the family’s holding in LVMH at 50.2% of the shares and 66.4% of the voting rights. Those voting rights are what the rest of this story protects. A man who sits on one board where his family has the votes and another where it has none will learn something at the second.
Frédéric Arnault runs the watches and the family holding
Frédéric, born in 1994, went to TAG Heuer in 2017 and was running it by 2020, when he was in his mid-twenties. Since January 2024 he has been chairman and chief executive of LVMH Watches. On 18 April 2024 he and Alexandre were voted on to the LVMH board together, each with a little over 93 per cent of the shareholders’ votes, which in a company the family controls is less a contest than a show of polite enthusiasm.
The watches are the visible half of his job. A 2024 report also named him managing director of Financière Agache, the family holding, and that title now comes with a footnote. Under the plan Christian Dior announced on 23 September 2026, Financière Agache is to be absorbed by Agache, Agache in turn by Christian Dior, and the survivor reconstituted as a partnership limited by shares under its new name. Taken with the 2024 reports, that means the holding Frédéric manages and the holding Antoine chairs are to end up as a single company, two brothers’ briefs folded into one structure. Three companies become one, and the one that remains is built so that its partners, not its shareholders, decide who runs it. Families that mean to last tend to prefer fewer envelopes.
Jean Arnault is the only one without a board seat
Jean, born in 1998, is the youngest. He has been director of marketing and development at Louis Vuitton’s watches division since August 2021, when he was 23, which makes two Arnault sons in watches and a family with a sharper sense of time than most. LVMH’s governance page lists four Arnault children on the board, and he is the one it leaves out. His brothers reached it at around 30, and he is 28 this year, so the omission looks less like a verdict than a queue.
Where it counts most, though, he stands level with the rest. When Agache was reorganised in 2022, its control came to be exercised by a general partner, Agache Commandité SAS, whose capital is held equally by the five children, with their father as its first and only managing general partner. For now, then, one man manages and five children own, in equal shares. It was reported in 2024 that only the five siblings can be partners and that none can sell before 2052, twenty-six years from now. Jean will be 54 that year, assuming nobody rewrites the rules in the meantime. The board seat can wait; the youngest already holds the same share of the partnership as the eldest.
As for who takes the chair, nobody has published an answer. In July 2026 Le Monde ran a six-day series on Arnault’s empire and closed it on the succession, which it described as a poison at the heart of LVMH. Two days later LVMH posted a three-page letter from Arnault, and Forbes reported that he rejected the portrayal. The newspaper chose its word, and the chairman answered in his own name, at length, on the group’s own site. Fortune gives his age as 77, and reported that in 2022 he lifted the age limit on his own job to 80. That leaves the rule with three years to run, unless its author lifts it again.
Whoever is eventually given his title will answer to a partnership that the five already share. For now, their father is the only one managing it.
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Cover photographs: Bertrand Rindoff / Bestimage via Purepeople; via Wikimedia Commons.
