David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think he'd been saying this. I think this is his lip service of like, well, it makes sense for me to be involved with this transaction because Dior is missing one final piece of the puzzle and you guys own it. Also, this would make him very wealthy because this whole time, the way that you go buy up stock in the market is you bid it up. All this ownership that he had of LVMH that he'd been buying with Guinness has gone up and up and up in value, so they're like, look, he's going to get even richer and he's going to get the perfume brand back to reunite it. It seems like this is what he would want. Yup. Racamier and Chevalier are newly reunited in their desire to break up the company, offer Arnault a parting gift of gifting him essentially back Dior perfume so he can reunite his business, and then go on his way. This is where Bernard reveals his true intentions, which is he's coming at the king, not because he wants to steal his scepter or something like that, he wants to be the king. He wants LVMH. He gets this offer from the two of them and he's like, yeah, I'll get back to you on that. The next two days in the markets, he goes out, and he blows essentially all of his capital. He deploys another $500 million in the next two days in the markets, bringing it to over $1 billion within a very short period of time in additional capital that he's put up. He's now $2 billion of his own capital, I think, into this. He, I believe, sold some of the Dior and the former Boussac entities, getting closer and closer to not being the controlling shareholder anymore. He's basically mortgaging that business in order to free up the capital to go and make a big play to win LVMH.…

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