EssilorLuxottica: €30 billion for Delfin, and the heirs' war hides the concentration of power

According to Le Figaro, the feud within the Del Vecchio family is destabilising EssilorLuxottica, the Franco-Italian eyewear giant. The daily reports that Czech billionaire Michal Strnad is offering €30 billion to buy Delfin, the family holding company that owns 32% of the group. The account also mentions criticism aimed at the management. What the dispatch does not say: whether the heirs are willing to sell, what the management thinks of the offer, or what timetable is taking shape. We won't make it up.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The press loves family sagas: a patriarch, heirs, a suitor. It is convenient, because it turns a question of economic power into a matter of personalities. Yet the stakes are not psychological. A holding company that controls nearly a third of a group of this size is a lever: it makes it possible to steer thousands of jobs, investment choices and pricing policy, with an entry stake far below the value of the whole. Whoever holds Delfin holds a share of the decisions. The €30 billion measures the price of that lever, not the price of an inheritance quarrel.

This is capital concentration in its most classic sense: already gigantic fortunes aggregating, buying each other out, and changing hands between owners who are ever richer. Marx saw in this a tendency of accumulation itself, competition leading to centralisation in fewer and fewer hands. Here, the potential buyer is a billionaire and the potential seller a dynasty. Neither, a priori, is the one who makes or sells the frames and lenses.

Hence a simple question: where do these billions come from? From the work of the group's employees, from the gap between what they produce and what they are paid. This surplus value, once accumulated, becomes a financial asset, then an object of desire. In this case, a succession dispute is a dispute over sharing a haul whose terms the producers never get to discuss. The opticians, the factory workers and the customers who pay for their glasses do not sit at the table.

Note the vocabulary too. We read that the war "destabilises" the group, as if the company were a fragile organism shaken from outside. But it is identifiable shareholders and executives who are fighting. Market fetishism loves verbs without subjects: uncertainty weighs, value wobbles. Let us put people back behind the verbs.

What we expect to see: if the offer is accepted, who will actually control the group, and on what terms for employees and consumers. When a near-monopoly changes owners, prices rarely fall.