Eight heirs, 12.5 per cent each, no casting vote. Four years after the founder’s death, the family that owns Ray-Ban is arguing in a Luxembourg courtroom, in an open letter, and now on an Italian rapper’s podcast.
27 June 2022
A man who spent six decades making every decision alone left eight people the power to block one another.
Forbes put the fortune at an estimated $25.5 billion when the founder of Luxottica died, with six children from three relationships, ranging in age from 18 to 65. Bloomberg’s account of the estate is that he designated eight heirs and entrusted a handful of longtime advisers to oversee the empire: Nicoletta Zampillo, his widow; Claudio, Marisa, Paola, Leonardo Maria, Luca and Clemente Del Vecchio; and Rocco Basilico, Zampillo’s son from her previous marriage to Paolo Basilico. Each received 12.5 per cent of Delfin, the Luxembourg holding company.
Delfin is not a trophy vehicle. It controls a 32.4 per cent stake in EssilorLuxottica, sits as top shareholder in Monte dei Paschi di Siena and holds minority positions in Generali, UniCredit and Covivio. Francesco Milleri, the founder’s closest lieutenant, was installed as chairman of the listed company and chairman of Delfin.
Eight equal shares and no mechanism for breaking a tie is a structure, not an accident. Alessandro Minichilli, who teaches corporate governance and family business at Bocconi, told Bloomberg what that means in practice:
“The structure he left behind forces the heirs to seek consensus without giving them a clear way out if consensus fails.” as he put it to Bloomberg
Roberta Crivellaro, managing partner at Withers in Italy, told the same reporters that putting all the heirs on the same level, despite differing interests and ages, was “a mistake”.
19 February 2026
Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, born in Milan in 1995, Bocconi-educated, chairman of Ray-Ban and chief strategy officer of EssilorLuxottica, decided consensus could be bought.
He wrote to Delfin saying he might be ready to purchase the 12.5 per cent stakes held by Luca and Paola, at a discount to market values, as La Repubblica reported and Bloomberg relayed. The arithmetic implied something near €14 billion. The sellers on his list were his half-sister and his half-brother Luca, who is 25 and holds an economics degree from Bocconi and a master’s from London Business School. The youngest shareholder, Clemente, is 22 and became the world’s youngest billionaire at 18 in 2023.
Nobody in this family needs the money. They need the signatures.
6 March 2026
To the Financial Times he said the parties were “close to agreeing a price”, and described himself as willing to buy his siblings’ stakes in order to become Delfin’s main shareholder, close the outstanding issues around his father’s estate and execute the will. He added that he was not making a power move, and that he wanted to build trust after four years of disputes.
That was the last calm sentence of the year.
8 May to 30 June 2026
In May, Rocco Basilico filed a claim in a Luxembourg court that, Bloomberg reported, could complicate the deal approved the previous month by Delfin’s owners. The stepson and the son of the same mother were now on opposite sides of a filing.
In June the temperature dropped briefly: Reuters reported on the 4th that two heirs had reached a provisional agreement to settle and drop cross-lawsuits involving the holding company. Sixteen days later, Leonardo Maria published an open letter on the website of Quotidiano Nazionale, the newspaper he owns, accusing Delfin’s board of failing to explain its shifting position on a transaction that would have made him the largest shareholder of the vehicle. By then the structure under discussion was valued at around €10 billion and would have given him 37.5 per cent, per Bloomberg.
He then skipped Delfin’s annual meeting at the end of the month, saying the conditions for a productive meeting were not in place. A shareholder with 12.5 per cent cannot win a vote. He can decline to attend one.
25 August 2026
He left the company. A spokesperson said he had stepped down from all his roles to focus on new business projects, which is the sentence companies issue when the other sentences are unprintable.
His resignation letter to Milleri, published by Milano Finanza, condemned a management style that had become “remote” and “impersonal”. He was 31, chairman of the brand his father bought in 1999, and he surrendered the title along with the strategy job. Outside EssilorLuxottica he runs the Twiga nightclubs and LMDV Capital, which is a different kind of portfolio from a 32.4 per cent industrial stake.
September 2026
The company closed ranks with speed. On the 9th, the board said it had “unanimously reaffirmed its full confidence” in Milleri, his management team and the group’s strategy, Reuters reported. Two days later, twenty of Milleri’s senior managers went public in his defence, an intervention Bloomberg described as an escalating war of words.
Then the quieter business, which is where these fights are actually decided. At a Luxembourg hearing on the 22nd, Delfin sought a six-month extension to the period for exercising pre-emption rights over stake transfers sought by three heirs: Leonardo Maria, Clemente and Rocco Basilico. Each, according to Bloomberg, wanted to move personally owned Delfin holdings into investment vehicles that would give them greater financial flexibility over their inheritance.
Pre-emption rights are the clause that stops a 12.5 per cent block walking out of the family. Three of the eight were testing the lock.
12 October 2026
He went on Pulp Podcast, hosted by the rapper Fedez and Davide Marra, and talked for a long time. He disclosed his past struggles with drug addiction, in his own words, unprompted by any proceeding. Then he returned to the share price.
“He who loses 50% should be a bit more tense,” he said of the chief executive, in remarks reported and translated by Bloomberg, adding that there had not been the right vision after his father and that the market, not he, was saying so. He said he could not put his face behind a name like Del Vecchio while salaries were frozen and shares fell.
The company’s own investor page shows the stock closing at €148.70 on 15 October, against a 52-week high of €323.80 noted in market commentary when BofA cut its target price to €205 that month.
On the podcast he also supplied the detail that explains everything and settles nothing. By his account, an estate Italian media value at about €40 billion is held up by a fight over a legacy of roughly €300 million: the shares the founder’s will left to Milleri, about 2.15 million of them, worth around €340 million at the time, as Bloomberg reported in 2022. That characterisation is his own. No court has endorsed it, and the company has not accepted it.
15 October 2026
Three days after the podcast, Reuters reported that Delfin had held preliminary talks with banks about financing the purchase of stakes held by one or more of its own shareholders. The company’s net asset value sits at around €40 billion, the bulk of it the EssilorLuxottica holding, though some outlets have published figures nearer €55 billion on different valuation dates.
The buyout would do one thing: reduce the shareholder register from eight names to six. Whether it connects to Leonardo Maria’s earlier proposal, or replaces it, has not been confirmed by any party.
Six heirs at roughly 16.5 per cent each, and still nobody at 51.
Cover photograph via The Independent.
