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A 72-year-old French beauty heiress has grown about $24 billion richer this year — and is now wealthier than Asia’s richest person.
Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, the granddaughter of L’Oréal founder Eugène Schueller, has seen her net worth surge by 32% over the last eight months to around $98 billion, as of Monday.
That reflects a 17% jump in L’Oréal stock this year to nearly $400, which has boosted the value of Bettencourt Meyers’ 35% stake in the parent company of Maybelline, Lancôme, and Redken.
Bettencourt Meyers was the sixth-biggest wealth gainer this year on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at Friday’s close, outpacing Alphabet cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Pop Mart CEO Wang Ning, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who were up between $17 billion and $21 billion since the start of January.
She ranked 18th on the rich list, one spot ahead of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, worth nearly $97 billion. But she was still three spots behind Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress with a $118 billion fortune who replaced her as the world’s richest woman last year.
Bettencourt Meyers inherited her L’Oréal stake after her mother, Lilian, died in 2017 and became the first woman to achieve a $100 billion net worth in late 2023. However, a sharp decline in the cosmetics company’s stock last year meant she started 2025 with less than $75 billion.
In April, she retired from L’Oréal’s board of directors after 28 years. One of her two sons, Jean-Victor Meyers, succeeded her as vice chair.
L’Oréal shares have leapt this year after the company reported strong first-half growth with like-for-like revenues up 3%, and higher sales across its four product categories and in four out of five territories.
JPMorgan also upgraded the stock in late July from “underweight” to “neutral,” citing its brightening growth outlook.
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