#355 Rare Bernard Arnault Interview

**David Senra** (0:00)
I've only been able to find one biography on Bernard Arnault that's in English. That biography is over 30 years old. It is really difficult to find. At any given time, you'll see it for sale on Amazon, anywhere from $1,500 to over $5,000 for a copy. I covered that book last year on episode 296 And since I've read that book, I've become fascinated by Arnault. And so not only are there not many biographies on Arnault, but he does not give interviews very frequently. So I was excited when I saw that Bloomberg Businessweek actually did this long form piece called The House of Arnault. And I wind up reading this three times, I sent it to a bunch of friends. And as I was reading it, so many of the lessons that you and I talked about on this podcast up here over and over and over again came to mind. So what I decided to do is like, well, if I'm super excited about this, I'm reading it multiple times, I'm sending it to friends, I should obviously do an episode on it. And so what I did is I printed out the long form piece and I went through and highlighted and added notes just like I would for any other book. So let's start at the very beginning. The title is The House of Arnault. The subtitle is his company LVMH bought up many of the world's major luxury brands and he's not finished shopping. And it was written by Brad Stone and Angelina Rascouet. And so the piece starts with Arnault visiting his stores. Every Saturday morning, Bernard Arnault spends a few hours checking in on his temples devoted to handbags, couture, jewelry and watches. The 75 year old chairman and chief executive officer is not there to shop. With a strict sensibility refined over decades, Arnault spots any incongruities that might disrupt the aura of opulence that he has carefully constructed. Then he reels off texts and emails to his senior executives, describing any perceived deficiencies in bullet points of obsessive detail. So this idea of bullet points of obsessive detail, anytime I do an episode on people that are still alive, when the episode comes out inevitably, I will get all these stories back for people that either know the person I covered or had worked with them for a long period of time. This is, I got a bunch of crazy, just incredible Arnault stories after I put that episode out last year.
And a lot of them centered on this, his, just the insane level of attention to detail that he has.
That idea is going to be repeated throughout the story, but it also comes up over and over again in these anecdotes of stories that I heard about him.
And as we're about to see with this story that his son, his oldest son, Antoine Arnault tells, his dad has this extensive database in his head. And so Bernard sends his son a message, says, he recalls one such missive from his father critiquing a counter at a store in Tokyo. He loved the first concept I did at Berluti with an architect 12 years ago. He comes back to me with, do you remember that bar that you had in that store? Put it here.
His son, Alex Owen, is working at Tiffany and Company and also has a story. He says a similar story from his father's recent visit to Dubai. He made a bunch of comments that were very, very detail oriented. From the chairs in the stores to the shoes that the salespeople were wearing. Things that you won't typically notice, but once you've seen tens of thousands of stores over the years, I think it's what comes to your mind immediately. So I want to pause there. I think this idea of what he just said is extremely important. Once you've seen tens of thousands of stores over the years, I think it's what comes to your mind immediately. And this is something that pops up over and over again in these biographies that you and I study together. The importance of quantity, the importance of volume. I think of these in two different domains. One, this excessive learning that you see that all these top entrepreneurs do, and two, just the decades of decades of experience. So what I was thinking about when I got to this section is something that's come up over and over and again. It's not that they're these top entrepreneurs and inventors and investors. It's not like they find themselves interested in something and they'll read like one book on them. They will devour whole shelves.
That line, devouring whole shelves comes from this biography on a young Winston Churchill. It said while other politicians were content to get their information from a scattering of newspapers, he devoured whole shelves. It says Churchill began sleeping with encyclopedias. This is something that pops up over and over again. Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid when he was a young man. He read every single book in the library at Harvard on light, which was his field of scientific expertise, his interest. When he was done with that, he drops out of Harvard, moves to New York City, goes to the New York City Public Library and does the exact same thing, read every single book on his field of interest. Thomas Edison, when he was a young boy working on the railroads, they would stop over and I think Detroit, he would usually have several hours to kill. He read the entire library in Detroit. Jeff Bezos, when he was a young man, there's a story in his biography as well. He would spend summers with his grandfather on the ranch in Texas.