Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yup. Once this happens and Bernard gets the blocking minority, Chevalier resigns immediately and just rides off into the sunset. Racamier, he's so pissed. He keeps fighting. He sues Bernard, he sues everybody. The case is drag out in court for a couple of years, it gets super ugly in the press. Finally, when it becomes clear that he's not going to win his court cases in April of 1990, he privately resigns, and he walks off the job without telling Bernard or anybody else at LVMH. That day, Bernard calls Louis Vuitton. The receptionist answers the phone and says, I'm sorry, Mr. Racamier is no longer on the premises. I think they've never talked again. To your point, what they didn't understand, and if they had, maybe they would have acted differently toward him, Bernard is not a corporate raider. He has a big vision here. There are some great quotes from him from this time from all these interviews he was doing. He says, "I told my team at the time that we will build the first luxury group in the world. Obviously, it was very ambitious, but it galvanized the team and we started to build. Some people say I'm a wolf. That is not at all true. Wolves break up companies into pieces. It was Racamier who wanted to cut the company into pieces. I was the only one who did not want to dismantle it," which is doublespeak. If you choose your own definition of what a wolf is, then it is easy to not appear as one. Was he a corporate raider? I don't know. He used corporate raider tactics to acquire control. He didn't follow every single corporate raider playbook strategy to cut it all up afterwards. Does it make you not a corporate raider if you maintain control afterwards? I don't know. Maybe that's fair. It's nuanced, and I do think it is a misunderstanding of him to call him a corporate raider. When I tweeted the other day that he was a corporate raider, and you texted me and you were like, oh, come on, he's more than that, you're right. He uses those tactics to acquire control. You are being intentionally provocative. I think the most important strategic takeaway, though, from this episode and all this drama, is something that Bernard says at the time about Chevalier. He's much more conciliatory towards Chevalier than Racamier because they didn't have the huge fight in the same way. He says, "Mr. Chevalier was an excellent manager, and I agree with his strategies. His problem is that he was not the majority shareholder in his company. In the businesses I manage, I'm the principal shareholder and that helps me control the situation." For what he's trying to achieve to build this first global luxury conglomerate, especially in the era of corporate raiding, it's only going to work if he has ironclad majority control over everything.…

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