As of 2025, France was home to 53 of the world's billionaires, coming in 11th place for countries with the most billionaires, according to the World Population Review.
France fell behind the UK, which is in 10th place with 55 billionaires, and ahead of Taiwan with 51 billionaires.
The top three countries (also the world's most populous countries) are; the United States (813 billionaires), China (406), and India (200). France's neighbours, Italy and Germany, were also home to more billionaires, with 73 and 132, respectively.
As France weighs instituting a new tax on the super wealthy, The Local looks at the country's home-grown billionaires.
READ MORE: Explained: France's proposed 'Zucman tax' on the super-rich
Who are France's wealthiest billionaires?
Measuring wealth is not always the simplest task - billionaires' net worth can change drastically in short periods of time, as their assets are often tied up in company stock prices, which fluctuate, and some of the world's richest people are quite coy about their net worth.
For this article, we've used the Forbes business ranking, which updates daily.
1 Bernard Arnault and family - According to Forbes' official 2025 billionaires list, LVMH's Bernard Arnault (and family) took the top slot with a net worth of $178 billion.
Arnault was the only French billionaire to make the top 10 international list, coming in fifth place, behind Oracle's Larry Ellison and ahead of investor Warren Buffett.
Arnault was briefly the world's richest person in 2022, overtaking Elon Musk when Musk was busy tanking Tesla's share price.
He took over his father's construction company and diversified into luxury brands, creating the powerhouse that is now LVMH - born out of the merger in 1987 of trunk-maker Louis Vuitton and the wines and spirits group Moet Hennessy.
READ MORE: Who is France's luxury emperor Bernard Arnault?
2 Françoise Bettencourt Meyers and family - Granddaughter of the founder of L'Oréal, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers (and family), took second place in the list of France's billionaires with a net worth of $81.6 billion.
Meyers is the second-wealthiest woman in the world, behind Walmart heiress Alice Walton.
She inherited her wealth from her mother, Liliane Bettencourt, who died in 2017. Liliane was the only child of Eugène Schueller, who founded L'Oréal - a chemist from Alsace, Schueller, began his career in Paris after he was asked to develop a new hair dye in 1904.
Schueller was a Nazi sympathiser and a member of La Cagoule, a violent pro-fascist organisation that supported the Vichy regime. Schueller's son-in-law, André Bettencourt (spouse of Liliane and father of Françoise), was also a member, but he later switched sides to join the French resistance toward the end of the war.
3 Alain and Gerard Wertheimer - The Wertheimer brothers tied for third place, each with a net worth of $36 billion. Together, they own the luxury brand Chanel.
The brothers inherited their wealth as the grandsons of Pierre Wertheimer, the co-founder of the Chanel perfume company. Pierre and his brother, Paul, collaborated with Coco Chanel to create the famous perfume, Chanel No. 5 in 1921.
The business arrangement meant that Coco Chanel would only retain a small percentage of the perfume, allowing the Wertheimers to run the brand.
However, Chanel was unhappy with the arrangement and spent years suing for ownership. The Wertheimers were Jewish, which meant their property and businesses could be seized by the Nazis. Chanel attempted to regain control at this time. She was unsuccessful, finding that the brothers had temporarily transferred ownership to a Christian friend, who gave Parfum Chanel back to them after the war.
5 Emmanuel Besnier - With an estimated net worth of $24.5 billion, Emmanuel Besnier took fifth place as the main shareholder of the family-held company Lactalis, which is the world's largest dairy products group.
Lactalis is also France's second-largest food product group, behind Danone, and it owns a number of other brands, such as Kraft Natural Cheese and Stonyfield Farm. Several French billionaires are associated with the Besnier family.
Emmanuel took over as head of the Lactalis group in 2000, after his father, Michel Besnier, died of a heart attack.
As for the origins of the brand, it was Emmanuel's grandfather, André Besnier, who initially founded a small cheese-making company in 1933 in Laval, south-west France. Upon André's death in 1955, he left his company of 50 people to his son Michel.
It was Michel who grew Lactalis into the leading dairy conglomerate of the EU. Lactalis notably launched the Président brand of Camembert in 1968, and in 1990, it acquired the influential French dairy group, Group Bridel.
6 François Pinault and family - As 'honorary chairman' and co-founder of the luxury group Kering - named as a reference to the Breton word 'Ker', meaning home or hearth - François Pinault is worth $21.7 billion. Kering owns the fashion brands Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Gucci and Balenciaga.
Pinault, aged 89, is originally from Brittany and started off working in his father's timber business. He specialised in timber trading in the 1960s and eventually grew his business into a leading timber trader in France by the 1980s. In the late 1980s, Pinault began investing in the retail sector.
He also founded the investment holding company Artemis, which his son, François-Henri Pinault (married to Selma Hayek), is the president of, in addition to being chairman of Kering.
7 Laurent Dassault, Thierry Dassault and Marie-Hélène Habert-Dassault - Each worth $10.6 billion, the three Dassault children inherited a significant portion of the Dassault aerospace and software fortune when their father Serge Dassault died in 2018. They are also involved in the running of the Dassault Group.
Serge also had a fourth child, Olivier Dassault, who died in a plane crash in 2021. His fortune was left to his three children and his widow, Natacha Nikolajevic. Olivier also served as an MP for the right-wing Les Républicains party.
Serge took over as CEO of Avions Marcel Dassault after the death of his father, Marcel Bloch, who started the aircraft company in 1928.
The company grew during the inter-war period, but during World War II, France's aviation industry was mostly dismantled, save for work required by Nazi Germany. As a Jewish man, Marcel refused to collaborate with the Nazis and was imprisoned and later sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
After the war, Marcel converted to Catholicism and changed the family's name to Dassault, a reference to his brother's nom de guerre as a fighter in the French Resistance.
Notably, the Rafale fighter jet was designed and built by Dassault Aviation. The Dassault family also owns the French daily Le Figaro.
7 Xavier Niel and family - Also worth $10.6 billion, like the Dassault siblings, Xavier Niel owns the telecommunications company Iliad, which is the parent company of internet service provider Free.
Unlike many of the other French billionaires, Xavier Niel made his own money.
Niel became interested in telecommunication at an early age, and apparently got in trouble with the police for hacking Canal+ decoders. He alleges that he briefly offered help with espionage for French intelligence services, and even accessed the phone data of former president François Mitterrand.
At 19, he created and sold a 'Minitel rose service', basically a business providing a precursor to internet sex chat and erotica via Minitel, itself a precursor to the internet. He became a millionaire by age 24, and in the 1990s, he invested in internet service providers. In 1999, he created Free, the internet provider.
Recently, he was a seed investor in France's Mistral AI, and he created the free tech and coding school École 42 in 2013. He was awarded the French Légion d'honneur in 2022.
11 Vincent Bolloré and family - Seen in some circles as France's Rupert Murdoch, Vincent Bolloré, the son of industrialist Michel Bolloré and Monqiue Follot (herself the daughter of industrialists), is worth $10.3 billion.
He ran the family conglomerate, the Bolloré Group, until 2022, when he retired. The Bolloré Group was initially founded in 1822 as a paper manufacturer named Papeteries d'Odet, which primarily produced cigarette wrappers and Bibles.
A former investment banker, Bolloré took over the family company when it was on the brink of collapse in the 1981, managing to secure investment and eventually turn a profit by 1984.
In the 1990s, Bolloré invested in transport and logistics, and in the 2000s, he began investing in media and communications. Nowadays, the international conglomerate is run by Bolloré's son, Cyrille.
A Catholic and conservative, Bolloré also owns several right-wing and far-right media outlets in France, and he recently acquired the weekly Journal du Dimanche.
READ MORE: OPINION: French media risks becoming a political playground for billionaires
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