{"id":3925,"date":"2026-04-02T09:25:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T09:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/3925\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T09:25:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T09:25:33","slug":"bernard-arnault-said-2-wealth-tax-would-destroy-french-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/3925\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard Arnault Said 2% Wealth Tax Would Destroy French Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bernard Arnault<\/a>, France’s richest man and the CEO of luxury giant LVMH, has criticized France’s proposed 2% wealth tax.<\/p>\n

French economist Gabriel Zucman<\/a> proposed the tax, which would be imposed on the ultra-rich with net worths of over 100 million euros, or about $117 million. French Prime Minister S\u00e9bastien Lecornu is now under pressure from the Socialist Party to include the wealth tax in France’s 2026 budget.<\/p>\n

Speaking to British newspaper The Sunday Times<\/a>, Arnault said, “This is clearly not a technical or economic debate, but rather a clearly stated desire to destroy the French economy.”<\/p>\n

He slammed Zucman, calling him a “far-left activist” and saying that he was using some “pseudo-academic” expertise to destroy the liberal economy.<\/p>\n

As of Monday, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegged Arnault’s net worth at $169 billion, placing him eighth on the world’s richest list. He once occupied the top spot<\/a> when his net worth surpassed Elon Musk’s at the end of 2022.<\/p>\n

Zucman responded to Arnault’s criticisms in a series of X posts on Sunday.<\/p>\n

He said he was surprised by the “caricatural nature” of Arnault’s attacks on him, and the tycoon’s comments “depart from rationality and are unfounded.”<\/p>\n

Zucman denied Arnault’s claims that his motives were political in nature. He said he has never been an activist in any movement or a member of any party, and his only work was as a researcher and teacher. According to his faculty profile, he teaches at the Paris School of Economics and UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

“Whatever you may think, the time has come to subject billionaires to a minimum tax rate,” Zucman wrote on X, calling it an “instrument of justice, social peace, and budgetary stability.”<\/p>\n

Reuters reported that in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron scrapped France’s decadeslong wealth tax<\/a>, which was imposed on individuals with assets above 1.3 million euros.<\/p>\n

Protests broke out in France last week over the French government’s proposed budget cuts, with protesters carrying “tax the rich” banners in support of Zucman’s proposed tax plan.<\/p>\n

Zucman and representatives for LVMH did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man and the CEO of luxury giant LVMH, has criticized France’s proposed 2% wealth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[163],"tags":[762,1062,4626,4622,1874,245,3974,2105,4625,4624,4623,3973,1022,4621,4620],"class_list":{"0":"post-3925","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bernard-arnault","8":"tag-bernard-arnault","9":"tag-budget","10":"tag-caricatural-nature","11":"tag-comment","12":"tag-economics","13":"tag-france","14":"tag-french-economy","15":"tag-net-worth","16":"tag-rich-man","17":"tag-socialist-party","18":"tag-sunday-times","19":"tag-wealth-tax","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-x-post","22":"tag-zucman"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116334397042842615","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}