Over a lingering lunch with a friend just off the Champs-Elysees, Bernard Arnault, head of the £354 billion LVMH luxury goods empire — and by some distance now the world’s richest man — was asked which of his children he saw as his possible successor. The inscrutable Arnault fixed his acquaintance with an apologetic smile and, spreading his hands, replied: ‘Well, I have five . . .’ before his voice tailed off. And in recent years, that enigmatic response has been the closest the man dubbed ‘a wolf in cashmere’ has come to addressing a most enthralling and glamorous inheritance saga that has kept the chic salons of Paris aflame with gossip. Will it be his 45-year-old son Antoine, long assumed to be the frontrunner? Or his eldest child Delphine, 47, who has just been promoted over her brother’s head?
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