The owner of an $11 billion fashion fortune says he plans to adopt his 51-year-old gardener and make him the official heir to a portion of his riches from the Hermès dynasty, multiple outlets reported, adding Nicolas Puech to a list of the extremely wealthy making surprising decisions about where to bequeath their fortunes.
Pedestrians walk past a French high fashion luxury goods manufacturer Hermès store in Shanghai.
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Key Takeaways
- Puech, who does not have a spouse or children, plans to leave roughly half of his immense wealth and real estate portfolio to his gardener and his family, according to Swiss publication Tribune de Genève, a move that comes amid a reported rift over business decisions within the family.
- Worth an estimated $11.5 billion, Puech reportedly plans to leave his gardener half of his wealth, and has already given him a property in Morocco and a villa in Switzerland, worth a combined total of almost $6 million.
- The move is a rare one for legacy wealth families—Puech is a fifth-generation heir of Thierry Hermès, who founded the luxury fashion house in 1837—but unique inheritance arrangements aren’t unheard of, even among the ultra rich.
- In 2007, man of noble Portuguese lineage named Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral de Camara reportedly left his bank accounts, 12-room apartment in Lisbon, house in Portugal, luxury car and two motorcycles to a group of 70 people whose names he randomly plucked from a phone book more than a decade ahead of his death.
- A Canadian lawyer in the 1920s left a significant portion of his healthy estate to a trust that would be liquidated 10 years after his death and given to a Toronto woman who managed to birth the most children between 1926 to 1936—four mothers ultimately benefited from the scheme dubbed the “Great Stork Derby,” and each received $110,000 (the equivalent of about $2.4 million today).
- Now known as the “Dogeville Hermit,” a Wisconsin man named Archibald McArthur left just $5 each to his family members when he died in the early 1900s and left the rest of his money (about $3 million today) to a man he once befriended on a park bench.
- One of the wealthiest men in Michigan did pass on his estate to his family, but not until a century after he died—Wellington Burt included a provision in the will for his $110 million fortune that didn’t allow it to pass on until 21 years after the death of his last surviving grandchild, and 12 people inherited the money in 2010.
- Earlier this year, a secret multimillionaire in New Hampshire decided to leave all of his wealth — $3.8 million — to the town he’d lived in for decades.
Key Background
Puech is ranked as the world’s 162th richest person as of Thursday with an estimated net worth of $11.5 billion. He owns about 5% of the Hermes company, the world’s second most-valuable luxury brand. His plan to give his fortune to the gardener comes amid tensions within the Hermès family that date back over a decade, starting with a hostile takeover bid by fashion powerhouse LVMH’s that saw the conglomerate stealthily acquire 23% of the company between 2001 and 2013. To block a takeover by LVMH (which is owned by Bernard Arnault, the second-richest man in the world) Puech’s family members set up a holding company that now owns more than half of Hermès shares, but Puech held on to his stake. Ultimately, Arnault and LVMH agreed to divest their shares. In 2014, Puech resigned from the company’s supervisory board and a spokesperson reported it was because he had “felt for several years beleaguered by members of his family, who have attacked him on several fronts.”
Tangent
For some of the ultra rich, being human isn’t a requirement to inherit. When Leona “Queen of Mean” Helmsley died in 2007, the billionaire widow of former New York real estate and hotel tycoon Harry Helmsley left her pet Maltese named Trouble a trust fund valued at $12 million dollars. A judge ultimately ruled that way more than needed to care for the dog and his inheritance was cut to $2 million.
Trouble died in 2011 and the remaining money went to “charitable purposes,” according to the New York Times. Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld willed his Burmese cat, Choupette, an unconfirmed amount of his roughly $300 million estate before he died, he told Numéro. Choupette is said to have brought in millions of her own dollars in modeling gigs over the years. When the widow of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry died in 2008, she reportedly left roughly $3.3 million to her pets, and the Guinness World Records includes a cat named Blackie as the richest feline in the world—she inherited about $12.5 million when her antiques dealer owner, Ben Rea, died in 1988. Rea left nothing for his family.
Surprising Fact
A handful of celebrities have said they don’t plan to pass their fortunes to their children for a number of reasons. George Lucas, the billionaire creator of the Star Wars universe, said the proceeds from the $4.5 billion sale of the franchise to Disney will go to educational causes—not his four children. Lucas is also a signee of the Giving Pledge, a charitable campaign that encourages the world’s wealthiest to donate a majority to philanthropic causes. Billionaires who’ve committed include founders Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, MacKenzie Scott and Mark Zuckerberg. Other celebrities who’ve said they’ll bequeath their money elsewhere include Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, Daniel Craig, Gordon Ramsay and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of late Apple founder Steve Jobs.
This article was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
