The glass ceiling holding female billionaires back from amassing $100 billion net worths has finally been shattered. Last week, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, heiress to the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune, briefly saw her fortune top $100 billion for the first time, before sliding back to its current $97 billion. Her fortunes surged as shares in L’Oréal SA stock surged, after posting its best single business year since 1998.
Bettencourt Meyers, who has mostly stayed away from the limelight, is known for intellectual pursuits. She’s written two books: A five-volume study of the Bible and a genealogy of the Greek gods. She also plays the piano for hours daily. That’s in addition to her duties as vice-chair on the L’Oréal board of directors.
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Francoise was also one of the subjects of a recent Netflix documentary “The Billionaire, The Butler and the Boyfriend. The documentary chronicled her feuds over control over the family fortune, which she ultimately inherited from mother Liliane Bettencourt in 2017. As the title suggests, the feud ultimately resulted in a huge public scandal with far-reaching and dramatic twists and turns.
L’Oréal is now worth some $268 billion, and Bettencourt Meyers and her sons Jean-Victor Meyers and Nicolas Meyers (also on the board of directors) are the company’s biggest shareholders. L’Oréal dates all the way back to 1909, when it was first founded by chemist Eugene Schueller, Francoise’s grandfather.
Outside of these publicly available details and the depiction of her seen in the documentary, not much is known of Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, who has preferred to avoid the spotlight throughout her life. That’s challenging enough as the sole heir to one of the largest luxury retail fortunes in France, a country that’s home to many other world-making luxury goods fortunes, including that of Bernard Arnault, the second-richest person in the world with a fortune of $180 billion. But now that she’s not only the richest woman in the world but the first ever to have a fortune of over $100 billion, she might have an even harder time keeping her name out of the papers.