Bernard Arnault says he made an early investment in Netflix, and regrets selling it prematurely.
LVMH's billionaire CEO discussed the bet during a rare interview on the "Legend" podcast, aired earlier this month.
Speaking in French, Arnault told host Guillaume Pley his family office acquired "nearly 20% of Netflix" shortly after its launch, and the wager proved to be a "huge success."
But Arnault — whose company owns dozens of luxury brands including Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon, Sephora, and Tiffany & Co — said he "sold too soon" as Netflix stock has "multiplied tenfold" since his exit.
Groupe Arnault invested $30 million in Netflix in July 1999, becoming its largest investor about two years after its founding, according to news reports from that period. At the time, Netflix was still privately owned and in the business of mailing rented DVDs to customers.
However, Arnault's team sold much of the position by the summer of 2003, when Netflix's market capitalization was about $500 million — roughly 1/600 of the video-streaming giant's current value of around $300 billion.
Ignoring dilution and any other factors, a 20% stake in Netflix would be worth about $60 billion today, and would have been worth over $110 billion when the stock peaked last summer.
Arnault also said during the podcast episode that he'd invested in a US fund that was liquidated during the dot-com crash, and as a result, he received a "big batch" of Google shares when they were trading for around $2 to $3 each.
"We didn't know Google back then," Arnault said. "We sold them somewhere along the line," he continued, noting they "made a good profit."
Google, now Alphabet, has seen its market capitalization jump by more than 130-fold since its public debut in August 2004, from below $30 billion to around $4 trillion. The search-and-advertising titan has benefited from high hopes that it will be a dominant player in the AI era.
Arnault may have sold Netflix and Google stock at a tiny fraction of their current value, but he's still thrived financially. His estimated $156 billion fortune makes him the wealthiest non-American on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and richer than Warren Buffett.
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Theron Mohamed is a London-based correspondent on the Trending team at Business Insider. His coverage spans finance, investing, wealth, markets, and the economy.Theron joined BI in 2019 as a reporter at Markets Insider and rose to the rank of correspondent before moving to the Trending team in 2024. He previously covered tech, media, and telecom stocks for Investors Chronicle magazine and had a brief stint on the Financial Times' Data team. He interned at the Wall Street Journal in New York where he primarily wrote for Heard on the Street.Theron has freelanced for The Independent, The Telegraph, WIRED, and several smaller publications. He holds an undergraduate degree in geography from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.Theron often covers Warren Buffett, Michael Burry, Jeremy Grantham and other top-flight investors. He also writes about the world's wealthiest people and shares financial advice from all manner of rich and successful people.Email Theron at [email protected] and follow him on X @theron_mohamed.Expertise
- Corporate finance
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- Business history
- US economy
- Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway
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