The LVMH chairman and CEO said his family office invested $30 million in Netflix in 1999 and later exited, missing much of the company’s rise to roughly $300 billion in market value.
Bernard Arnault said Groupe Arnault was an early Netflix backer that took nearly 20% of the company soon after its 1997 founding, but exited long before the streaming company’s valuation reached the hundreds of billions of dollars. Speaking on the French-language "Legend" podcast hosted by Guillaume Pley, Arnault said the family office invested $30 million in July 1999, when Netflix was still a private DVD-by-mail service, and had sold most of the position by the summer of 2003, when the company’s market capitalization was about $500 million. He said he "sold too soon" and that Netflix shares have "multiplied tenfold" since his exit. Based on the figures cited, an undiluted 20% stake would be worth about $60 billion at Netflix’s current roughly $300 billion valuation and would have exceeded $110 billion at last summer’s peak. Arnault also said he received a "big batch" of Google shares through the liquidation of a U.S. investment fund during the dot-com crash, when the stock traded at roughly $2 to $3 apiece, but sold those shares as well, though he said the family office still "made a good profit." Alphabet, Google’s parent, has grown from a market capitalization of under $30 billion at its August 2004 initial public offering to around $4 trillion. Arnault, whose fortune is estimated at $156 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, said the missed exits highlight a familiar investor trade-off between taking profits early and holding for far larger long-term gains.