Forbes once put the Hermès heir Nicolas Puech at $15.6bn; today Forbes, Hermès and Puech’s own lawyers all treat the shares behind that number as gone.
Ask the internet for Nicolas Puech’s net worth and it will still offer a number between $11bn and $16bn, most of it written in 2023 and 2024. Those figures were sensible when they were published. They also describe a man whose own lawyers told a Geneva court in 2024 that he no longer owns the shares that produced them.
There are two kinds of figure in his story. The first are estimates that Forbes and Bloomberg published on particular dates, at that day’s share price. The second is plain arithmetic, applying a closing share price to the 6.08 million shares Hermès once declared in his name. Neither is a net worth a private bank would sign off, which is rather the point.
What is Nicolas Puech’s net worth in 2026?
Officially, he does not have one. Forbes valued him at $14.8bn at the end of 2024 and then removed him from its billionaires list, a fall that Forbes Australia places in 2025, amid his legal disputes with his former wealth manager.
What remains is a hypothetical. Hermès closed at €1,238.50 on Euronext Paris on Friday 23 October 2026, a 52-week low according to CNBC, the day after the house reported nine-month revenue of €12.26bn, up 5.5 per cent at constant exchange rates. At that price the 6.08 million shares once declared in his name would be worth about €7.53bn. At CNBC’s 52-week high of €2,300, on 15 January 2026, the same block came to almost €14bn. Shares that Puech says he cannot find still managed to lose about 46 per cent of their value in nine months.
The other numbers attached to him in 2026 belong to lawsuits: about €14bn sought in his civil case in Paris, and more than $1.3bn sought from him in Washington.
Who is Nicolas Puech, and how is he related to Hermès?
Forbes describes him as a fifth-generation descendant of Thierry Hermès, who founded the house in 1837. Reported ages put his birth in 1943, and Forbes now gives his age as 83. He is unmarried, has no known children, and Forbes lists him in Martigny, in the Swiss canton of Valais.
His formal role at Hermès ended when he resigned from the supervisory board in August 2014. What he declined to do mattered more. When relatives led by his brother, Bertrand Puech, pooled their shares in the family holdings to repel LVMH, Nicolas kept his out, and Fortune reports that the family saw this as a betrayal. In a family company, abstaining counts as a vote.
How many Hermès shares did Nicolas Puech own?
The most precise answer once came from Hermès itself. For three years the company cited signed declarations that he owned 5.8 per cent of its capital, or 6.08 million shares, of which 900,000 were held by his own Fondation Nicolas Puech, according to Fortune. From its 2016 annual report onwards, Hermès stopped breaking the holding out.
Since then the percentage has drifted with whoever was doing the estimating. Bloomberg said in December 2023 that he purportedly owned about 5.7 per cent, and Forbes said “about 5%” that same month. In April 2025 Bloomberg added that if he still held the original stake of roughly 5.7 per cent, he would be the largest individual shareholder in Hermès. The conditional carries most of the weight.
Why did Forbes drop Nicolas Puech from the billionaires list?
For a while Forbes counted him with some enthusiasm. It ranked him 162nd in the world in December 2023 with an estimated $11.5bn, and its profile put him at $15.6bn in April 2024, noting that he had resigned from the board in August 2014 but still owned just under 5 per cent of the company.
Then the shares became the problem. In December 2025 Forbes named him the biggest faller of a year it otherwise called a banner one for billionaires, and gave its reason plainly.
Without those shares, Forbes has dropped Puech… off the billionaires list entirely.
Forbes describes him as having alleged that his Hermès shares vanished, and that his late financial adviser sold the stock without his knowledge to Bernard Arnault and LVMH, both of which have denied it. Hermès has reached the same conclusion about the shares from the other side of the table. On its earnings call of 30 July 2025, executive chairman Axel Dumas said he believed Puech no longer held them and that Hermès had started legal proceedings, according to Business of Fashion.
Did Nicolas Puech plan to leave his fortune to his gardener?
According to the Tribune de Genève, he planned to leave roughly half of his wealth and real estate to his former gardener and the gardener’s family, a report Forbes relayed in December 2023. The man has not been named by Bloomberg, Forbes or the Swiss paper. The Tribune de Genève described him, as relayed by The Week, as a 51-year-old handyman of Moroccan origin who had been entrusted with the keys to Puech’s properties in Montreux and Marrakesh. Adoption was reported as part of the plan, though no report has said it was ever completed.
The plan ran into an older arrangement. Bloomberg reported, in a story Fortune carried on 19 December 2023, that Puech wanted to revoke an earlier inheritance agreement with the Isocrates Foundation, the charity he created in 2011 as the Fondation Nicolas Puech, which supports journalism. The foundation publicly opposed the move while saying it was open to discussion, according to Fortune. His lawyer at the time, Jörn-Albert Bostelmann, declined to comment on specifics, and Hermès declined to comment at all.
Forbes put the Montreux and Marrakesh properties at almost $6m combined. Nobody has yet reported them missing.
What did the Swiss courts decide about Éric Freymond?
Éric Freymond, a Geneva wealth manager, looked after Puech’s money for more than two decades. According to the Geneva ruling as reported by Bloomberg, he managed two Swiss bank accounts holding Puech’s Hermès stock from 1998 to 2022, while the heir retained control over them. Puech cut ties with him in 2022 and said he then discovered the shares had gone, and three complaints against Freymond followed in autumn 2023.
In those proceedings Puech’s lawyers told the court he no longer owned the assets, about 6 million shares worth roughly €12bn, InvestmentNews reported. On 12 July 2024 the Geneva appeals court found no evidence that Freymond had mismanaged the fortune, or that Puech had been duped over more than two decades, and all three lawsuits were dismissed. Puech did not appeal.
Freymond, who denied all wrongdoing, died in July 2025, aged 67.
Is Nicolas Puech suing Bernard Arnault and LVMH?
He is, in a civil case in Paris. Reuters reported in December 2025 that Puech had sued Arnault and LVMH, among other parties, over the claimed deprivation of his Hermès shares, his first known legal challenge against either. LVMH, responding to French reports of the suit, said it never diverted Hermès shares, according to WWD. The Paris prosecutor confirmed that a criminal investigation was pending and that, so far, only Freymond had been placed under formal investigation; Arnault and his companies had not.
Reuters later reported that the civil suit seeks about €14bn from whoever may be found guilty in that parallel criminal probe, which has targeted Freymond and a lawyer who advised LVMH on its covert stakebuilding in the 2000s. Counsel appeared in court in Paris on 20 November 2025 for an initial hearing.
In September 2026 Reuters added an older layer: an agreement, signed in 2002, for LVMH to buy Puech’s shares. Reuters drew on a 2017 Swiss court filing in which LVMH said that agreement was never executed, and reported that LVMH had forcefully denied, in a June 2026 filing, ever trying to acquire Hermès shares from Puech. At the share prices of the day, Reuters put a 6 per cent stake at about $10bn. Agreements that were never executed have a habit of turning up in somebody else’s filing.
What was the reported Qatar deal for Nicolas Puech’s Hermès shares?
For now it exists as an allegation in an American lawsuit. Bloomberg reported in April 2025 that Honor America Capital LLC had sued Puech in Washington the previous month, accusing him of failing to deliver Hermès shares worth around €14bn under a sale agreement. Honor America’s chairman said the purchase was backed by Qatar’s Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and the company sought more than $1.3bn in damages.
The filings reportedly include a letter dated 27 February, signed by Honor America’s chairman, Abdulla Mishal Al Thani, referring to full funding commitments. By March the agreement had reportedly collapsed, with the broker told the shares could not be retrieved from Lombard Odier, the Geneva custodian.
Puech’s lawyer, Grégoire Mangeat, “strongly contests” that his client played any role in the sale or knew of it before reading about it in the press, and told Bloomberg his team was trying to establish where the shares are and how to get them back. A buyer suing a man for failing to deliver shares the man says he cannot find has, at the very least, a certain symmetry.
Is Nicolas Puech still a billionaire?
Forbes says no, having dropped him from its list in 2025. Hermès’s executive chairman believes the shares have gone, and Puech’s own lawyers told a Geneva court he no longer owns them, which leaves very few people arguing the other side.
Had the declared stake stayed where Hermès once said it was, it would have been worth about €7.53bn at the 23 October 2026 close, in a company CNBC valued at €130.748bn that day. The Geneva dismissal of July 2024 is the one court outcome reported so far, and it went against him. The largest number attached to Nicolas Puech in 2026 is the €14bn he is seeking in Paris.
No court has yet said whether he will see any of it.
