A look at François-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of luxury conglomerate PPR.
It’s easy to envy the charmed life of François-Henri Pinault. He’s the scion of a French family whose fortune exceeds $6 billion and whose holdings include the auction house Christie’s and Château Latour, a top Bordeaux vineyard. Since 2005 he has run the family’s main asset, a publicly traded $28-billion-a-year conglomerate called PPR that owns some of the world’s best-known luxury brands, including Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Yves Saint Laurent. Stella McCartney works for him, as does enfant terrible designer Alexander McQueen. On Valentine’s Day this year Pinault (pronounced peen-oh) married Hollywood star Salma Hayek in a Paris ceremony and subsequently threw a masked ball in Venice for 150 of the couple’s closest friends, including Edward Norton, Bono, Penélope Cruz, and Charlize Theron. – From Fortune