LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault speaks to CNBC's Sara Eisen at the Yale CEO Summit — 12/17/2025

There aren't very many people in the world who can do what he's done in life. He is exactly the opposite of what people think he is. We're dealing with one of the most successful people in the world, one of the great taste makers in the world, somebody with great vision, somebody with a great eye. He's always thinking, always thinking about the future, not only about the iconic titles, brands that he has. People who don't know him have a completely different idea of the people who know him. He's one of the wealthiest people in the world and his wealth was accomplished in a single generation. LVMH is comprised of 70 different brands divided into six different sectors. It covers everything from the highest end perfumes and wines to the best leather goods in the world.

Sephora, he was completely ahead of the game. I remember when it first opened and everyone said he was crazy and it was never going to work. He recognized that there would be a taste for luxury goods and frankly an ability to pay for them. Bernard Arnault is the architect that brought them all together under one house, and it was a success. It is a recognized success. He's a dreamer. He dreams big dreams, and then he has the guts to go after those dreams. Sometimes I try to tell him the dream is too big, but of course he's always right. The dreams are never big enough.

We are pleased to welcome and I will ask them to come up in sequence in just one moment: Anna Wintour, the global editorial director of Vogue and chief content officer of Condé Nast. We have Steve Schwarzman, a great personal friend of mine for many decades, the chairman and CEO of Blackstone. Another friend of mine, Ivanka Trump, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and who actually helped in our government going through some pretty important transitions in recent past. Michael Burke, chairman and CEO of LVMH Americas, whom you just met in passing and hopefully will be considered a new friend of mine if I don't push wrong buttons here at the podium. And then Sarah will be with us to help moderate and lead us in a Q&A discussion afterwards briefly. Sarah Eisen at CNBC, Squawk on the Street, and their consumer goods superstar among various fields of expertise. So I'd like to bring up now Anna Wintour.

Thank you. So, good afternoon everyone. It is a pleasure to be here with you today to honor the great Bernard Arnault. A few weeks ago I was in London to give his daughter and colleague Delphine a prestigious award. And now here I am in New York presenting Bernard with the vaunted Yale Legend in Leadership Award. Any other Arnaults due to receive honors should feel free to look me up. I seem to be the officier, as the French would say, de permanence, for this task. Though I fear that for so accomplished and industrious a family, it could easily turn into a round-the-clock posting. The truth is that when it comes to the business of creativity, there are talented leaders and then there is Bernard Arnault. It is astonishing to think how different the work that I do, how different the recent history of fashion would be if he had not swept into our path. And yet, what exactly Bernard does do remains mysterious. As many of you will have noticed, Bernard is not an easy man to get to know. I have been meeting with him for some four decades and yet I still find him as fascinatingly enigmatic as Gerhard Richter's Forest 3 painting, which is of course in Bernard's collection. All I seem to have are traces and gestures linking from a person who has worked across the canvas at great speed. To say that Bernard is interested in his companies is like saying Glenn Gould was interested in Bach. He is an obsessive who feels the enterprise in every corner of his soul. Bernard and I were once lucky enough both to be invited to a meeting at the White House, a different time and a different administration. I proposed that afterwards we might enjoy what the capital had to offer. Perhaps we could visit a couple of museums along the mall or see what was on at the Kennedy Center. Bernard took on the unhappy expression of a man who had been asked to attend a three-hour lecture on soil erosion. His notion of a great day in the American capital, it turned out, was the same as his notion of a relaxing Saturday morning in Paris, which is visiting all the LVMH shops in town to see what they could be doing better. For these reasons, and for others, one might not guess he was a man with a singular fashion genius. I'm not sure I've ever seen him wearing anything other than a blue or a gray suit. The idea that he might one day show up in a bright Kenzo embroidered sweater is, I think I speak for all of us here in saying, both tantalizing and also rather alarming. And yet somewhere beneath his dark tie is a man of brave and radical conviction. It was Bernard after all who brought two scrappy unknown British kids, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, to Dior and Givenchy, and who installed Virgil Abloh, Marc Jacobs, and Phoebe Philo and so many others in fashion's firmament. And that was just the 90s. Today we are in the midst of a new moment of thrilling upheaval in fashion and Bernard is once more at its core. His year has been filled with unexpected and exciting new appointments. The exceptional young Irish designer Jonathan Anderson is reimagining Dior, while the rising American stars Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez have jumped in head first at Loewe. Maria Grazia Chiuri, in a gesture that recognizes her remarkable talent, has been dispatched to revive the hallowed halls of Fendi. At our lunches over the years, I have begun very slowly to find a window onto where this daring and this passion comes from. We discuss art, of which Bernard has quietly but surely become one of France's leading champions, not least through his extraordinary foundation museum in Paris. We talk about politics and the economic future, which in both of our countries has been on a dizzying ride. We talk about young talent in fashion, or at least I talk about it. Bernard listens courteously and he mostly ignores my suggestions. And of course, most joyfully for me, we talk about tennis. I think I won a French Open trophy of my own, at least in Bernard's eyes, for introducing him some years ago to the great Roger Federer. But the truth is that like Roger or like fashion itself, Bernard himself has changed with the times. He has opened up and become more global along with the world that he represents. In China recently, many people approached asking Bernard to bless their babies for luck. Something that I believe otherwise happens only to Tom Cruise. It's that extraordinary flexibility, that openness, and that eagerness I believe is the secret to Bernard's brilliant core. He has of course relationships with the great and the good across the world and he seems in his own way to be having the time of his life, and that is surely thanks to the support, emotional, intellectual, and yes professional, that he gets from his family. This past October, in a biblical storm in Milan, I somehow found myself sitting in a courtyard outside wrapped in cashmere loaned to me by Frédéric Arnault. He wanted me to stay despite the torrential rain because he wanted to talk with passion about the quality and expansion of the house for which he is the CEO, Loro Piana. The fruit really doesn't fall far from the tree. I thought, Frédéric is surely a man who visits his stores every Saturday. It is unsurprising that all the Arnault children are intelligent, well-mannered, and seem to speak a hundred languages. But it is a testament to Bernard that they share their father's passion and eye for the creative world, that glint of eagerness and wonder that sometimes shines through his eyes. They all clear a space for creativity and imaginative risk at a moment when across the world these qualities seem embattled. So congratulations on receiving the Yale Legend in Leadership Award, Bernard. And please tell all your family, I'd be happy to introduce any of them anytime, anywhere. Thank you.

Thank you very much. That was just beautiful, Anna. Thank you so much. Spoken of course by somebody who understands the world of culture, but also the world of the written word. That eloquence, Steve, I don't know how you're going to do it, but you're up to it. I would hate to have to follow that as a cold call. Steve Schwarzman.

Now that's a tough act to follow. But I met Bernard Arnault 25 years ago. I went to his house in Saint-Tropez, where I have a house as well. It was a dinner for seven people. Bernard and I were walking outside the house looking over the Mediterranean and in a classic American fashion I said something like, 'So how did you make your money?' And he said, well, it was very interesting. He said, 'I was working at my family business, which started in the engineering area, and then he took it into real estate. And then he said, 'I was contacted by Antoine Bernheim, the very famous managing partner of Lazard Frères, and he said they had a very interesting situation with a company called Boussac Saint-Frères, which was in bankruptcy, and they were looking at taking it over and rationalizing it, which means selling off the parts and seeing if there's a lot left for the effort. And they asked me if I wanted to do that for them.' So he said it was a really interesting opportunity. We ended up getting control of the company. It had a huge number of subsidiaries, I think it was at least 40. And he said, 'After we got control, my job was to sell them off to make the company more efficient, and when I got to the end of the project, I was supposed to get compensation for that, very much like today's leveraged buyout business. And he said, 'I decided instead of compensation, I'd like a small unprofitable company at the end of it called Christian Dior.' And that's what I got out of the deal. He said, 'I thought it had real potential,' which I guess is one of the great understatements. He also got a company called Bon Marché, which was a department store business. He used that, took two years to figure that out, and then after that, he ended up in a complex situation with LVMH and ended up merging that and turning it around, and everything basically worked. He said it was not something that I expected at all. His background as a person: he went to the École Polytechnique, which is the top university in France, and he got a degree in mathematics and civil engineering. So you wouldn't exactly think he'd be in the fashion business with that background. The question is, how does he do all these things? I found out from one of my friends, as you would think with a company of this scale, that he has a large staff and there's constant things put in front of him for approval. But as it works out, he doesn't have a staff. He does everything himself. He works with just one person on every deal. He's done a huge number of deals in his life, almost all of which have a very interesting real estate component where he had his own success before this building of the luxury business. He's a brilliant strategist as well as a tactician. So when I saw him with some frequency in Saint-Tropez, we would play tennis and Anna mentioned his interest. The first time we went out, it was just the two of us. I used to play every day in those times. He's a very tall, lanky person. He got on the court and I didn't quite know what to expect, and he hits the ball quite hard. He has one dominant stroke, which is a crosscourt topspin forehand. We were playing a match and I didn't play matches so much. I used to just hit for the pleasure of it. I used to be intensely competitive, but I thought I graduated. You get on a court with Bernard, it's a fight to the death. I didn't expect that. The first time the ball just sort of whizzed by me with that spin going over to my right, sort of forcing me off the court. I said, 'The guy won't hit that a second time because you know it's coming.' And of course he hit it the second time with even more spin and wider strokes, forcing you off the court further. We had a very enjoyable two sets. I forgot who won, which meant he probably did. We had a rematch and we did that for a while. As it worked out, we mostly split sets because I had to go into my old personality, not so mellow. I could see tennis reveals people's personalities, and this is someone who refuses to lose. Unfortunately, he met someone who was vaguely similar, and it was lots of fun. Then he started bringing his children over and we would play doubles. So I know most of the people in the family and I've watched them grow up. Now whether they're running Tiffany's or Loro Piana or Dior or whatever, it's amazing to see how focused everybody is. Bernard's all about family. He is an exceptionally private person, as Anna said. What we used to do after we played tennis was just sit around for like an hour to an hour and a half talking about the world. Bernard is a very interesting person to talk about the world because he touches a lot of parts of it. He's always looking for new things to do and he has an intensity of focus on everything that he does, both macro and micro. There's nothing that escapes him. Like all great entrepreneurs, he's always ready for the next project. It's like it's the first one. And like every entrepreneur, it's a project that must work. There's no averaging here. Every project works. Every new line has to work. Every new designer has to work. He's one of the few people who have mathematical analytical skills but also has this sense of style. He loves music, which is a lot like mathematics. He was a piano player himself, and his wife plays at the concert level. He has an enormous appreciation, as Anna mentioned, of art. He's built this marvelous facility in the Bois de Boulogne for exhibition space for LVMH. He's really one of the most extraordinary people. Bernard's success is no accident. This is not a one-hit wonder. This is somebody who's on it every time in every way, and it clearly gives him enormous pleasure. That's part of what makes him who he is. So it's a particular pleasure for me to be asked to do this because he's not a normal person. And I love being around people who have this astonishing dimension of everything new is exciting, wonderful, to be created, to be maximized. And he's got it as much as anyone in the world. Thank you.

So magnificent saga, the whole history of that relationship, Steve, thank you very much. And Ivanka, if you don't mind, thank you.

Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Stephen. And beautiful, beautiful words all around. It is a privilege to be here to celebrate Bernard Arnault, a leader who has built and rebuilt industries, shaped creativity across continents, and elevated the meaning of craftsmanship. And yet, as expressed up here by both Steve and Anna, the quality that I most admire in Bernard has nothing to do with business. It's his devotion to family. Every Saturday without exception, the entire Arnault family gathers together for lunch at the home of Bernard and his amazing wife Hélène. All of his children, all of their children every week. Before lunch, Bernard often visited his shop, as he has done for decades, with one of his children by his side. In a world that moves quickly, Bernard chooses presence. In a life defined by innovation, he chooses ritual, a grounding force that reveals who he is far more than any headline or even any award. I'm fortunate to know all of Bernard's children and to count them and their partners as friends. They're remarkable, kind and curious, grounded, united. Their character reflects the values Bernard instilled: intention, discipline, boldness, affection, quality shaped at those Saturday lunches and mirrored in the way he leads. That same consistency defines his relationship with his team. Bernard expects excellence and he offers loyalty, mentorship, and trust in return. Many of LVMH's senior leaders have spent decades under his guidance, a testament to a culture built on integrity, humility, and shared purpose. He has strengthened iconic maisons with the exact same care, protecting their soul and their heritage while guiding them towards renewed relevance. And then there's his legendary curiosity, the right brain, left brain fusion that is so unique in Bernard. He can propel the most visionary creative, take the boldest risk, and then still be able to see around corners with uncanny business sense and precision. It is the same spirit that drove him to spend more than 14 years working alongside the great architectural master Frank Gehry, who very sadly just passed, to bring the Fondation Louis Vuitton to life. A project he considers among his proudest. Working with Bernard and his incredible team has given me firsthand experience of his impeccably high standards, passion, dedication, and rigor. He brings that same discipline, as we've heard, to the tennis court, training four hours every week, regardless of weather and regardless of his schedule. Ever since the day he met Roger Federer, played him, and vowed after earning one single point that the next time they played, he would earn two. And he brings it to music, sharing with Hélène a deep love of the classical repertoire, even performing at the National Philharmonic Orchestra in Russia in 2017. One of my favorite stories to hear Bernard tell is of his first trip to New York in the 1970s when he asked a taxi driver if he knew the name of the French president. The cab driver said, 'No, but I know Christian Dior.' As Stella Bordignon, group vice president of retail development at LVMH, who has worked alongside Bernard for 30 years, told me just a couple of weeks ago in Paris, 'Greatness is the moment where vision and legacy meet.' That seems like a perfect working title for Bernard's life. Bernard's vision has defined iconic houses, yes, but more importantly, it has influenced people. Those he raised, those he's mentored, and the countless individuals inspired by his example. Bernard, your legacy will endure not only through the maisons you have shaped, but through the quiet integrity with which you lead, create, build, and inspire, reflected beautifully in the family and teams who carry your values into the world with such passion and grace. Today's award honors a legendary career, but equally a deeply admirable life. It is a privilege to present you the Yale Legend in Leadership Award. And while you join us virtually, we are honored to have Mr. Burke here to accept on your behalf. As one of your longest serving advisors and executives and somebody who has helped build and guide LVMH's presence in North America, being here is a powerful reflection of the trust, dedication, and enduring partnerships that define your leadership. Thank you, Mr. Bernard Arnault, and congratulations.

Thank you. The choreography would be if the three presenters could step over there and present together to Mr. Michael Burke. That would be wonderful. And then Michael would share a few words and bring in our guest recipient before we hand the show over to you, Sarah. But Sarah, I know that you listen very carefully, think on your feet for a living. But what we just heard as they're having their photos taken, I'm just doing Phil as you would say on air.

We call it tap dancing.

It's a pretty remarkable thing because we heard three presenters. We've all done multiple presentations. You must admit that's about as great a set of presentations we ever heard. They weren't scripted. There's no teleprompter here. They weren't working in committee for weeks trying to figure out who's covering what piece of the puzzle. But somehow they all instinctively drew on a different piece of their relationship with Bernard Arnault. I didn't see their scripts in advance. In hindsight, I probably should have requested, but they spoke from their heart. Anna, of course, who but you could speak to the aesthetic vision as you understood it and the definition of how he saw beauty and how perhaps the two of you sometimes saw it differently along the way, but also as you addressed the distinctiveness of his character, the privacy and the paradoxical humility of somebody in the world of building brands like no one else can. Who would you expect that humility to be with? And then as we turn to Steve, of course the entrepreneurial spirit, the business vision, and what you brought out about financial acumen with just a staff of one. As you can see, I've got teams of attendant staff here trying forever to pick up after me and I'm just running this little show here. In here, he manages to build the greatest of all fashion brands with just one person that he is able to do those deals. But also Steve, as you brought out, in addition to the financial acumen and the entrepreneurial spirit, of course is that competitiveness that brought out the old Steve Schwarzman that we knew in my youth as well. That's pretty astounding. If I had reflected on it, I would have thought Ivanka to ask you to turn to everything from family to foundation, but it didn't occur to me. But of course, you knew to speak to what you saw when you manage and enjoy your relationship with Bernard Arnault. You understood, as the other two presenters understood, something about the family and different life stages in the family, but also their role in society as you saw it, which was so astounding and understanding this sense of discipline, the sense of philanthropy, the sense of giving back. I don't think I could ever give an award presentation again now having heard the three of you. As you present to Michael, if Michael has a few words you'd like to share before we turn to Mr. Arnault, it would be tremendous. Thank you very much.