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He got his chance when an earlier merger of MoetHennessy and Louis Vuitton began breaking apart. The two controlling families disagreed on how to fend off raiders. The Moet family offered British brewer Guinness a 20% stake. To % fight back, the Vuittons brought in Arnault. What they didn't know was that Arnault had long had his eye on their company and had been buying shares since the October crash. Once an insider, Arnault switched sides. With Guinness he formed a holding company, which he controls, that owns 38% of Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Born to bourgeois comfort near Lille in northern France, Arnault joined the family construction company after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique, France's prestigious engineering school. Weary of puny profits from putting up warehouses and factories, Arnault moved the company into the lucrative new niche of building timesharing vacation complexes on the Riviera. with his wife and two young children. He prospered developing condominiums in Palm Beach and got an intensive course in American management methods.
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