Europe's richest man regrets selling his Netflix and Google shares too early
The owner of LVMH said that one of his investment mistakes was selling his Netflix shares too early / Photo: Shutterstock.com / Motorsport Photography F1
Billionaire Bernard Arnault, who owns the fashion brands Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Bulgari, admitted that he sold his stake in streaming giant Netflix—in which he was one of the earliest investors—too soon. A similar situation occurred with his early investments in Google.
Details
Arnault called selling his stake in Netflix too early one of his biggest investment mistakes. He spoke about this in an interview with the French podcast Legend.
Groupe Arnault’s family office acquired “nearly 20% of Netflix” shortly after the company was founded, Arnault said. The billionaire called this investment a “huge success,” but admitted that he exited it too early. After the sale, Netflix’s stock rose about tenfold, Arnault noted.
During the dot-com crash, Arnault also invested in an American fund that was later liquidated. As a result, he acquired a large stake in Google when the stock was trading at around $2–3 per share. “We didn’t know Google back then. We sold them later,” noted the head of LVMH, adding that the investment still yielded a good return.
Context
Groupe Arnault invested $30 million in Netflix in July 1999, becoming the company’s largest investor about two years after its founding, according to Business Insider, citing media reports from that time. At the time, Netflix was a DVD rental service and was not yet a publicly traded company. By the summer of 2003, Arnault had sold most of his stake, when Netflix’s market capitalization stood at about $500 million, Business Insider notes. The company is now valued at approximately $300 billion. Excluding dilution, a nearly 20% stake could be worth about $60 billion today, and more than $110 billion at the peak of the stock’s value last summer, the publication calculated.
Alphabet’s market capitalization has grown more than 130-fold since its 2004 IPO—from approximately $30 billion to $4 trillion, according to Business Insider. Despite missing out on gains from investments in Netflix and Google, Arnault’s fortune, according to Forbes, is estimated at approximately $143.6 billion, making him the richest person in Europe.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
