Author: openjargon

• Delphine Arnault, eldest child of LVMH head Bernard Arnault, is the CEO of Christian Dior.
• Apart from a brief stint at McKinsey, her career has spanned multiple roles for LVMH since 2000.
• All of her siblings also work at LVMH brands, including Louis Vuitton, Berluti, and TAG Heuer.

Delphine Arnault is one of the most powerful women in fashion.

The eldest daughter of the world's richest man, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, the 49-year-old Delphine is now a year into her role as CEO of Dior.

Since 2000, her career has spanned multiple roles with LVMH, including CEO of Dior since 2023.

Here's a look at Delphine Arnault's background and career.

Her father's eldest child (she has four younger brothers), she is the heiress-apparent to his luxury goods empire and fortune worth $218 billion.

Delphine was born near Paris on April 4, 1975, to Bernard Arnault and his first wife, Anne Dewavrin. She attended primary school in Paris, with a stint in the US at a French-American school where she became fluent in English.

After graduating from the London School of Economics in 1997, Delphine Arnault took a job at McKinsey.

"I was learning strategy," she told the Financial Times of her time at McKinsey. "In a presentation in America they would start with the conclusion and say how they got there, and I found that very interesting. It was straight to the point."

After McKinsey, she joined the fashion designer John Galliano's brand to gain more industry experience.

At the time, Galliano was also Dior's creative director.

In 2005, she married Italian wine heir Alessandro Vallarino Gancia in what Forbes called "France's wedding of the year."

Her wedding dress reportedly took 1,300 hours to make, but the marriage didn't last, according to Vogue.

She then began a relationship with French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel. They now have two children.

Niel is sometimes referred to as the Steve Jobs of France, according to Vogue. "She's his biggest cheerleader. He's her biggest cheerleader," artist Mark Bradford told the magazine.

Arnault is credited with elevating Raf Simons to replace John Galliano.

Galliano abruptly left Dior in 2011 after video footage of him making antisemitic remarks led to his ouster, and Delphine played a key role in shielding the company from fallout.

In 2013, Ms. Arnault took over all product-related activities for Louis Vuitton.

Louis Vuitton is the biggest brand at LVMH.

She told the FT her managerial style is "quite calm," though she's known to make surprise visits to stores on busy Saturday afternoons.

"I am always on my phone but it's good to meet people, to see them. To send a clear message," she said.

At 43, Arnault became the youngest member on the LVMH executive committee when she joined in 2019.

She was also just the second woman to join the committee.

In January 2023, LVMH announced she would take over the CEO role at Christian Dior.

Former Dior CEO Pietro Beccari moved over to Louis Vuitton.

"Under her leadership, the desirability of Louis Vuitton products advanced significantly, enabling the brand to regularly set new sales records," her father said in the announcement.

"Her keen insights and incomparable experience will be decisive assets in driving the ongoing development of Christian Dior," he added.

As a group, LVMH posted over $92 billion in sales last year, up 13% from the prior period.

The company doesn't separate financial information by brand, but half of its revenues come from fashion and leather goods.

Delphine's move is "significant," Citi analyst Thomas Chauvet told Reuters.

"Succession planning in strategic roles has been instrumental to the success of LVMH's key brands over the past 20 years," Chauvet said.

In April, Bernard Arnault added two more of Delphine's siblings to the LVMH board.

Of the five children, only the youngest, Jean Arnault, doesn't sit on the company's board – for now.

LVMH is "the leading business in Europe," Delphine told Vogue, and "Dior is the most famous French name in the world."

Of LVMH's 70-plus luxury brands, Dior has a particularly special significance in French culture, and Bernard Arnault has pledged €200 million to restore Notre Dame and €150 million to the Paris Olympics.

• Two Stifel employees have left following an investigation into their conduct.
• They worked in London for the St. Louis-based investment bank.
• Stifel told The Times of London it had "investigated and have taken appropriate action."

Two employees of Stifel have left the investment bank following an investigation into their conduct with a cleaning contractor.

The Times of London first reported the story involving workers at the US bank's offices in the City of London, near St Paul's Cathedral.

Stifel opened an investigation following allegations about improper relationships between employees and a "member of the external cleaning contractor," a Stifel representative told Bloomberg.

One worker resigned after the probe found misconduct had occurred, while the other left and was now involved in a "legal progress" with the firm, The Times reported.

A Stifel representative told The Times: "This matter, involving two employees, came to light several months ago. We investigated and have taken appropriate action. Both individuals are no longer with the firm."

Stifel did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Like many companies, the bank operates a code of conduct for employees.

According to its code of business conduct and ethics: "Stifel expects all Associates to act with integrity in their dealings with clients, other Associates, third parties, or anyone else they come into contact with as part of their association."

The firm has about 600 staff in London after acquiring another company a decade ago.

Some financial firms in London have suffered from accusations of misconduct and misogyny.

The #MeToo movement reportedly brought about some social change about sexism in Britain's financial sector.

However, MPs on the Treasury select committee were told earlier this year that some women felt that sexist conduct had now become more "underhand and pernicious."

The MPs heard that initiatives aimed at improving diversity and inclusion in financial services were welcome, but were "often 'tokenistic' or 'box-ticking' in nature and lacked the 'teeth' needed to drive genuine change."

• Famed investor Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway placed a $2.7 billion bet on Paramount in 2022.
• It hasn't worked, at all — Buffett just said he has sold all his stock and lost "quite a bit of money."
• Let's do some math to figure out what that means.

What's going to happen to Paramount, the once-mighty media conglomerate?

No one knows! Maybe the son of one of the world's richest men will buy it. Maybe Sony and Apollo, the big private equity company, will buy it. Maybe no one buys it, and it has to try to muddle through with an ungainly three-man leadership group running the place.

Anyway, Warren Buffett isn't sticking around to find out. The famed investor, who not very long ago owned 15% of Paramount, disclosed over the weekend that his Berkshire Hathaway holding company has sold its entire stake in the company this year.

"I was 100% responsible for the Paramount decision," Buffett told attendees at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting. "It was 100% my decision, and we've sold it all, and we lost quite a bit of money."

So how much is "quite a bit of money?"

Berkshire Hathaway hasn't disclosed the total amount (I've asked). But when someone who's worth an estimated $132 billion says "quite a bit of money," it's probably a very big amount. By my very rough estimates, it could be something in the $1.5 billion range.

The math: In 2022, Berkshire accumulated 91 million shares of Paramount B shares; Barron's estimates he paid "more than $30" per share. That's a $2.7 billion investment.

At the end of 2023, Berkshire announced it had sold off around 28 million of those shares during the last three months of the year. Per Bloomberg data, Paramount's average closing price during the quarter was $13.39. So, let's assume Berkshire was able to sell those shares for something in the $374 million range.

That left Berkshire with another 63.3 million Paramount shares at the beginning of 2024, and sometime between then and Saturday they have sold off the rest. Paramount's average during that timeframe was $12.38. That suggests Berkshire got another $784 million from those sales.

Add all that up, and it looks like Berkshire sold its Paramount stake for $1.2 billion after paying $2.7 billion for it — a $1.5 billion loss. Which does indeed seem like "quite a bit of money."

• Fisker is closing down its Manhattan Beach headquarters, three sources told Business Insider.
• The company has warned multiple times it might run out of money and could file for bankruptcy.
• Fisker has also gone through a number of layoffs over the past few months.

Fisker has begun to close its Manhattan Beach office, the site of the company's headquarters, three company sources told Business Insider.

Last month, the electric carmaker began telling workers at the office in Manhattan Beach, California, that they would be moved to the company's site in La Palma, California, by May 1, according to three workers with knowledge of the change.

Some workers were told to collect their belongings from the Manhattan Beach office in preparation for the move, the sources said.

The two facilities are located about 40 miles apart in California. Fisker began leasing the 73,000-square-foot office space in 2020. The La Palma site had been initially set up as a research and development space.

A spokesperson for Fisker declined to comment and a spokesperson for Continental Development Corporation, the company that leases out the office space, did not immediately respond to a request for comment ahead of publication.

The move comes as Fisker faces headwinds from a slowdown in the EV industry. The carmaker has warned multiple times over the past few months that it might run out of money and could file for bankruptcy within the year.

On April 23, Fisker said in the regulatory filing that it had just $54 million in cash equivalencies as of April 16 and "believes that its available liquidity will not be sufficient to meet its current obligations."

Fisker has said it is looking for additional funding or a potential buyer. In April, Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker told staff during an all-hands that the company was in talks with four different automakers regarding a potential acquisition.

The company has initiated a series of layoffs over the past few months and warned workers on April 29 that they could be laid off and Fisker's "facility will close" in two months if the automaker is not able to change its course.

Do you work for Fisker or have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email at gkay@businessinsider.com

• A coming recession could end up sparking a "violent correction" in stocks, Gary Shilling told BI.
• The top forecaster pointed to warning signs of a downturn, such as a weaker job market.
• A full-blown recession could kill investor speculation, sending stocks crashing, he warned.

Investors should be prepared for a recession with the potential to send the stock market plummeting this year, according to top forecaster Gary Shilling.

In an interview with Business Insider, the Wall Street vet — who was among the investors in the mid-2000s to call the subprime mortgage bubble — said he saw a recession coming by the end of the year as the job market continues to weaken. That could be the final blow to the stock market rally fueled by investor overconfidence, causing stocks to drop by as much as 30%, Shilling said. 

Shilling pointed to the recent run-up in risky assets, such as stocks and cryptocurrency. That itself is a sign the market is poised to drop, especially once a downturn gets underway, he said.

"You look at all the kind of speculation that we've had out there, it's indicative of a lot of overconfidence, and that usually gets corrected and corrected violently," he said. 

The economy has already been flashing key signs of weakness as high interest rates take their toll. The labor market is weakening, with the unemployment rate sticking close to a two-year high in March.

Meanwhile, quit rates slumped to around 2% in March, a sign that workers are waking up to difficult hiring conditions and are less willing to leave their jobs than they were in the past.

The job market, for one, is "obviously slipping" as firms pull back on hiring, Shilling said.

Shilling believes companies have held onto more workers than they needed due to the shortage of labor that slammed employers during the pandemic. Layoffs will escalate later this year, with unemployment peaking at 5%-7% as the economy continues to weaken, he predicted.

"Employers wanted to hang onto their workforce and even add to it, because they figured things were going to be tight forever. Well, they haven't been tight forever. The economy's growth has been slipping … Employers are simply cutting back," Shilling warned. 

Job losses could end up hitting Americans hard, especially since there are signs that many may be in worse shape financially than they were several years ago. Consumers probably blew through the last of their excess savings from the pandemic in March, San Francisco Fed economists estimated. 

Meanwhile, a handful of recession indicators have been sounding the alarm on the economy for months. The 2-10 Treasury yield curve, the bond market's most famous recession gauge, has been signaling a downturn since July 2022. The Conference Board's Leading Economic Index, another gauge of economic strength, ticked lower in April, though the measure is not yet in recessionary territory.

"When you start to see the softness in these indicators and the actual turn down in business can be long and variable, but they are reliable enough, and I think that the safe bet is for a recession starting later this year if we're not already in it," Shilling said.

Shilling is known for his contrarian and often bearish takes on the market. Previously, he told Business Insider he looks to actively disagree with other Wall Street strategists, as the consensus view is typically already discounted in markets.

"I think people are being overly optimistic and hopeful in the face of a lot of evidence to the contrary," he warned.

• The US economy may already be mired in recession, Danielle DiMartino Booth told Bloomberg TV.
• Downside labor revisions and rising job losses indicate a downturn has hit, the QI Research CEO said.
• She argues that by one unemployment indicator, a recession was triggered in October 2023.

The US is already mired in recessionary downturn, and rising job losses prove it, veteran forecaster Danielle DiMartino Booth told Bloomberg TV.

"Oh, my goodness, there's already been 22,000 job loss announcements in the month of May and it's still a fairly young month. So on a seasonal level, we're seeing a major pickup," the QI Research CEO said on Monday.

That a recession has arrived is not a new position for Booth, who has long been pointing at downward-revised labor figures to push against soft landing talk.

Booth supports this using an indicator developed by Goldman Sachs. It says that when the unemployment rate's three-month average moves up 0.3 percentage points from its 12-month low, it historically indicates a recession. 

By that standard, the rule was triggered in October of last year, according to recently published labor revisions through the third quarter of 2023, indicating job losses of 192,000.

"These revisions, they keep pushing us back further and further from where we thought we were," Booth told Fox Business late last month. 

And fresh data only points to a worsening labor environment, she now added. 

April's job report delivered fresh weakness to markets, with the number of nonfarm payrolls added coming in significantly below estimates. Unemployment also ticked up slightly month-to-month, rising to 3.9%.  

"There were 115,000 [job losses] in the month of April, which was seasonally higher than that of January and again, we're about 22,000 with just a hop skip and a jump four days into May of data, so we're definitely seeing an acceleration of job cut announcements," she said.

Other analysts have also projected rising recession risk, hand-in-hand with a labor market fallout. For instance, a hard landing could hit at the end of this year and send unemployment surging to 5%, economist David Rosenberg has said.

With the ramp up in layoffs, Booth also noted that offered severance will drop to 60 to 90 days, as opposed to the six to nine-month packages offered in 2023.

• MrBeast is hitting the brakes on his relationship with his talent-management company, Semafor reported.
• Talent firm Night Media has been working with the superstar YouTuber for six years.
• Two sources told Semafor that Night would "no longer be his primary talent management agency."

Superstar YouTuber MrBeast and his talent-management company, Night Media, are growing apart, according to a new report from Semafor.

The 25-year-old creator, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is taking increasing control over his business and told Texas-based Night that it would "no longer be his primary talent-management agency," Semafor reported, citing two anonymous sources who were briefed on the matter.

Night had been working with Donaldson since early 2018, when the company's CEO, Reed Duchscher, began helping Donaldson with his business.

"Reed has been with me since early on and has helped us grow to where we are," Donaldson said in the statement to Bloomberg. "As the company develops and our needs change, he and I continue to have a great relationship. At this point, it makes sense to put full focus into the growth of Feastables and for me to start building my own internal team."

Night declined to comment to Business Insider. The company told Bloomberg that Duchscher would still work with Donaldson on Feastables.

Night has developed into one of the biggest and most respected talent agencies in the creator space, and has developed a roster of clients, including YouTubers Dream, ZHC, and Safiya Nygaard. It's opened an early-stage venture-funding arm, a production studio, and a venture arm to help creators build their own companies. In 2023, it acquired another talent firm, LFM, which brought with it Kai Cenat, one of the largest Twitch streamers in the world, and it also bought a podcast network earlier this year.

At the same time, MrBeast's empire has continued to expand: the YouTuber told Time earlier this year he makes between $600 and $700 million in revenue a year. He's launched a variety of philanthropic initiatives, as well as a chocolate and snack brand, Feastables, and a virtual restaurant chain, Beast Burger.

The latter has been a source of conflict, and Donaldson has been trying to shut it down. A series of lawsuits were filed in 2023 and are still being litigated. Donaldson filed a suit against Beast Burger's partner company, Virtual Dining Concepts, alleging it had been serving "low quality," sometimes "inedible" food. The company responded with another lawsuit claiming that Donaldson and his company, Beast Investments, failed to keep contractual obligations.

Recently, Donaldson inked a partnership with Amazon Prime for a reality TV show. And MrBeast's main YouTube channel is about to snatch the top spot on the platform for the most subscribed channel in the world, with 256 million subscribers.

In this scenario of immense growth, it would make sense for Donaldson to be looking for a more bespoke approach. Other creators, like popular gaming YouTuber Preston Arsement, did just that with his company TBNR, as did TikTok star Charli D'Amelio.

• The US Air National Guard rebuke a proposal to shift space mission units to the Space Force.
• Internal surveys found that most personnel would rather retrain or retire than join the Space Force.
• Critics say it usurps state governors' authority and the wishes of the Guardsmen who want to stay.

Air National Guard leaders and enlisted Guardsmen on Friday called a legislative proposal to move units focused on space missions to the Space Force a threat to their existence and also said many of those personnel would rather retire or retrain into another job instead.

In a media roundtable with reporters, officers and enlisted from the Alaska, Colorado, and Hawaii Air National Guards took aim at the Air Force proposal, which seeks to move units in their states into the Space Force, usurping their state governors' authority and the wishes of most of the Guardsmen stationed in those areas. Internal polling from 14 Air National Guard units in seven states shows anywhere from 70% to 86% have no desire to become Space Force Guardians.

"Our internal survey indicates about 70% of our personnel would retrain or retire rather than join the Space Force," Air Force Col. Michael Griesbaum, commander of the Alaska Air National Guard's 168th Wing, told reporters Friday. "In our particular case, that would really represent an existential threat to the national security of the United States because the Space Force does not have the experience to replace my space operators who depart."

Rebukes from Air National Guard officials join a chorus of criticisms for the proposal, including a letter of opposition signed by the governors of 48 states as well as five US territories earlier this week.

"Governors must maintain full authority as commanders in chief of these assets to effectively protect operational readiness and America's communities," according to the letter, which was promoted by the National Governors Association. "Legislation that sidesteps, eliminates or otherwise reduces governors' authority within their states and territories undermines long-standing partnerships, precedence, military readiness and operational efficacy."

Air Force officials' legislative proposal 480 to Congress would change the status of Air National Guard units conducting space operations "from a unit of the Air National Guard of the United States to a unit of the United States Space Force; deactivate the unit; or assign the unit a new federal mission" and would do so "without the approval of its governor," Military.com reported last month.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, in response to Military.com last month, waived off the concerns, saying worries that the proposal would set a precedent undermining state governors' authority were overblown.

"We've had much, much more political attention over this than it deserves," Kendall said. "We need a way to integrate these space capabilities, which are very valuable to us, into the Space Force. This is a unique situation. I have no indication that either the Air Force or Army Guard, anybody, is contemplating any other changes."

But Air National Guard leaders have expressed concern, saying it would set a clear precedent for other services to potentially take more resources from the National Guard model.

"Nothing legislatively ever happens once," Griesbaum said. "If LP 480 is successful, it will open the door to a wholesale harvesting of National Guard resources, both from the Air National Guard and the Army National Guard to the regular components."

Enlisted Air National Guardsmen in space missions have concerns about losing the ties to their local communities, as well as potentially uprooting their families or civilian careers by being transferred to the active-duty force and the uncertainty that could come with that transition.

"I love this nation, and I love this state," Air Force Staff Sgt. Robert Brown with the Colorado Air National Guard's 233rd Space Group said. "I wanted to continue my service through the Air National Guard, and I didn't run the risk of getting stationed anywhere far from home. Currently, my wife and I are expecting a daughter in just about a month, so that really enforces our needs."

Since 2019, when the Space Force became the newest service branch under the Department of the Air Force, debates and conflicts have sprung up over what to do with the roughly 1,000 part-time Air National Guardsmen across 14 units operating space-related missions in Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, New York, and Ohio.

Kendall as well as some members of Congress say that the number of those affected would be less than that. But Guard officials are skeptical, saying officials are not counting all the units and all the states supporting those missions, as well as the support personnel.

Brig. Gen. Michael Bruno, director of joint staff for the Colorado National Guard, told reporters Friday that space operators with his state are currently deployed overseas helping with missions, and he worries that if the legislative proposal is approved, it may leave them with an uncertain future.

"These space professionals may not have a military job to come back to when they return," he said. "They volunteered to serve and sacrifice for their nation, state, and communities. I can only imagine how they and their families must feel if we break that trust with them."