The billionaire grandson of the founder of fashion giant Hermès is planning to adopt his 51-year-old gardener, so he can gift him his $11 billion fortune, plus a property in Marrakesh, Morocco, and a villa in Montreux, Switzerland, worth a combined total of €5.5 million ($5.9 million).
80-year-old Nicolas Puech, who is unmarried and childless, is in the process of making his “former gardener and handyman” from a “modest Moroccan family” his legal child, Swiss publication Tribune de Genève reported. Puech’s family and their lawyers, rather understandably, are P1SSED about the whole thing.
Hermès has a valuation of $220 billion and is now the third-largest publicly listed company in France (turns out selling handbags for $30k each is quite profitable), so it’s not like the rest of the Hermès heirs are going to go hungry. Still, when there’s $11 billion and two multi-million properties involved, I guess they thought they were entitled to a piece of it too?
Puech is a fifth-generation heir of Thierry Hermès, who founded the luxury fashion house in 1837 by opening a workshop in Paris. In 2014, the Hermès heir quit the company’s supervisory board after fashion rival LVMH acquired 23% of the company, which put him at odds with the rest of his family.
A spokesperson for Puech said at the time: “He resigned because he has felt for several years beleaguered by members of his family, who have attacked him on several fronts, not only regarding LVMH. He has had some very bad experiences and felt very badly and felt harshly criticized on numerous occasions, even while he is very attached to Hermès.”
10 years later, I guess Nicolas Puech decided it was time for a little payback against his family, and what better way to do it than by adopting his 51-year-old gardener and gifting him his $11 billion fortune and properties? It’s like an episode of Succession, but I think even Logan Roy wasn’t that petty.
Still, you’ve got to love the move on some level. Snubbing his equally rich, snobby family and friends to hand over the keys to his fortune to the gardener, who must be on cloud nine at the moment. Being unmarried and childless and estranged from his family for all this time, it’s no surprise he became good buddies with the gardener. Probably the only ‘normal’ person he had in his life, who he could talk about normal things with.
The best part about it is that he’s doing this while he’s still alive, instead of just putting it in his will. This allows him to troll his family with it for years to come and enjoy their meltdowns until he dies. Well played, Nicolas Puech. A masterclass on familial grudging, indeed.
For the window cleaner who gave his dead brother’s £367,000 to the homeless and was then ordered to pay it back, click HERE.
