Thread by @eisingerj

Comes the news that Bernard Arnault joins the exclusive $100 billion worth club! Congrats to him! Here's a story about suspicious securities transactions and journalism. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Back in 2001, LVMH, which was controlled by Arnault, mysteriously acquired a significant stake in Bouygues, a French telecom company. Bouygues stock had been collapsing in the wake of the global stock market bubble bust.

Analysts and investors were upset because you may have noticed that LVMH is (and was then) a luxury goods company, not a telecom company.

Oh, also, Arnault controlled some opaque personal companies that were selling Bouygues stock -- at around the same time!

But the upshot is that LVMH (and its shareholders) got saddled with a stake in a collapsing company in an unrelated industry and Arnault offloaded his losing position. The company and Arnault said the selling and the buying weren't connected.

I wrote a few columns about this when I was writing the "Heard In Europe" for at The Wall Street Journal Europe.

Here's one of the columns. I wouldn't say it's a masterpiece of clarity. I was (fairly) young! And writing three times a week! wsj.com/articles/SB995…

Years later I found out a pretty interesting story.

Around that time, Paul Steiger, the top editor at the WSJ, got married. He took his honeymoon in Paris. Apparently when he arrived, there was a note from Arnault requesting Steiger's presence at his offices.

Sidenote: LVMH was a non-trivial advertiser in the Wall Street Journal.

Steiger is anything but ungracious, and managed (somehow) to duck his new bride for a moment. When he arrived at the office, Arnault apparently harangued him about the injustice of my columns. I am quite certain Steiger's first thought was: "Eisinger who?"

He went home and read the columns. Then he called up Arnault and asked him if there were any factual errors. Thank Zeus & Odin, there weren't. Steiger told Arnault the columns were fair and that was that.

I never knew anything about it until years later. Actually I owe Arnault a lot because Steiger told me, "That's when you made your bones with me."

Steiger had backed an unknown reporter against one of the richest men in the world and one of the most important WSJ advertisers.

Oh, and as far as I know, there were no investigations of those suspicious transactions. Arnault got richer and richer and more and more powerful. But for that brief moment, an editor stood up to him. And for that, I'm deeply grateful.