How to Divide an Empire Fairly: The Del Vecchio Succession
CAFÉ MANSHA | Issue No. 1
What does fairness mean when family and business are at stake?
By Jagneet Malhotra
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A friend sent me an Instagram reel about the family behind Ray-Ban, Oakley and Persol tearing itself apart over an inheritance. I watched it on my way back from the gym, which is roughly the setting in which I have most of my creative thoughts. Two days earlier I'd sat with a family where the mother wanted the shares split evenly and one of the sons had been quietly rehearsing why that was the worst idea in the room. So the reel had somewhere to land.
That's how I found Leonardo Del Vecchio.
When he died in June 2022, most of the coverage went where coverage goes: the size of the fortune, and who got it. What eventually settled out was eight people holding equal shares of Delfin, the holding company through which the family owns its most important assets. Twelve and a half per cent each. Looked like a clean approach.
Then I looked at who the eight actually were. Six children from three relationships. Claudio, Marisa and Paola from his first marriage to Luciana Nervo; Leonardo Maria with Nicoletta Zampillo; Luca and Clemente from his relationship with Sabina Grossi. Then Nicoletta herself, whom he later remarried. Then Rocco Basilico, her son, his stepson.
Read that list again and try to find the version of it where everyone has the same relationship to the business. Different ages, different decades of contact with the man, different histories with each other. One of them had built a career inside the group. Some hadn't. And every one of them ends up at 12.5.
This is the part I couldn't leave alone, and I'll tell you why. In my experience, equal splits usually come from one of two places. A founder who has genuinely thought it through and decided that inclusion is worth more than precision, or a founder who has run out of appetite for the conversation. Leonardo was not a man who ran out of appetite. He spent sixty years building control into every seam of that company. So why would he leave behind a structure where eight very different people owned exactly the same amount?
I assumed the answer was fairness. That's the assumption everyone brings to an equal split, including most of the families I work with. The more I learned about him, the less it held.
He was born in Milan in 1935. His father died before he was born; his mother couldn't support the family and placed him in an orphanage. He left school at fourteen and apprenticed to a tool and die maker, and in 1961 he started Luxottica.
The toolmaking is the detail I thought was most fascinating. A frame isn't one object. it's materials, hinges, moulds, measurements, tolerances that have to agree with each other. One weak part and the whole thing is scrap. That is not a bad description of an estate plan, and I don't think a man who learned to think that way at fourteen ever stopped.
Luxottica started out making components for other eyewear companies, and then Leonardo began pulling the process inward. Complete frames, then distribution, then retail. LensCrafters. Ray-Ban. Sunglass Hut. Oakley. There's a term for this. Vertical integration. it's the kind of term that makes a sixty-year obsession sound like a strategy deck. What actually happened is that a man who had been poor kept buying the next thing that could hurt him if somebody else owned it. How the glasses were made. How they got to the store. Which brands the customer saw. Eventually the store itself.
That's the man. Then, after fifty-plus years of that, he agreed to something that ran directly against it.
In 2017, Luxottica and Essilor announced a combination worth roughly €50 billion. Essilor was the global leader in lenses; Luxottica brought the frames, the brands, the stores, the distribution. Industrially it was obvious. Governance was the problem. Leonardo became Executive Chairman, Essilor's Hubert Sagnières became Executive Vice Chairman, and neither side was supposed to control the other.
I've watched founders sign documents like this. They sign, and then they spend the next two years discovering what they signed. That's roughly what happened. The two sides fought over leadership and integration, Delfin started arbitration, and by May 2019 they'd settled it by handing more responsibility to two trusted executives. Francesco Milleri on the Luxottica side, Laurent Vacherot on the Essilor side. In December 2020, Sagnières stepped back from his executive role. Leonardo did the same. Milleri became CEO of EssilorLuxottica.
So the last chapter of Leonardo's career was learning to live inside a structure where he could not simply decide.
And then I noticed the thing I'd originally glanced over. The structure he left his family looks a great deal like the structure he had just spent three years learning to live with. His heirs didn't inherit EssilorLuxottica. They inherited Delfin. The family owns; professionals run the businesses; the important decisions need several people to agree. Nobody gets to be Leonardo.
I can't tell you whether those final years changed his mind about succession or whether he'd planned it that way all along. I can tell you which one I'd bet on, and it isn't the tidy one. Plans usually carry the shape of whatever the founder was living through when he made them.
After he died, the operating company did what you'd want. Under Milleri, EssilorLuxottica's market value passed €100 billion as it pushed into medical technology and smart eyewear through its partnership with Meta. From the outside, the business looked like it had barely noticed.
Delfin was another story. Eight equal stakes turned out not to mean eight equal objectives. Some heirs wanted distributions, some wanted out entirely, some wanted the holding company kept whole, and at least one wanted more say in where it went next. The bylaws required broad agreement for anything important: dividend policy needed six of eight, other decisions at least five, certain transfers needed consent from the other owners. Those thresholds did exactly what they were built to do. They made it very hard for one person to redirect Delfin alone. They also made it very hard to move at all.
Luca and Paola tried to shift their stakes into another vehicle so they could eventually sell. They couldn't get the unanimous support they needed and went to the Luxembourg courts. Leonardo Maria then offered to buy both stakes in a proposed €10 billion transaction that would have taken him from 12.5 per cent to 37.5. At the same time he was challenging his mother's transfer of part of her interest to Rocco, arguing his father had intended that stake to pass only after Nicoletta's death, and that keeping the rest inside the direct family line would protect Delfin's stability. Rocco, looking at the same family, saw a different problem. In a letter reported by the Financial Times he called the conflict destructive and proposed another route for shareholders who wanted to sell back to Delfin.
By June 2026, Leonardo Maria's buyout was in trouble. Banks wanted stronger guarantees, Delfin's board declined to support the financing, and the collateral had lost value along with EssilorLuxottica's share price. More shareholders were looking at exits.
From the outside it's easy to call that a failed plan. Family in court, two owners trying to get out, one trying to buy them, and the structure built to hold the ownership together sitting at the centre of the argument.
Except the business is fine. Better than fine. It kept growing under professional management, and no single disagreement among the heirs could force a sale of the crown asset or knock the operating company sideways. Which is where I got stuck, and where I suspect most advisors get stuck too: if the family is fighting and the company is protected, did the plan fail?
I kept writing the word fair in my notes, and somewhere in there I realised I'd been using it the way clients use it. They use it as a stand-in for a decision nobody wants to make. Leonardo wasn't optimising for fair. Look at what each rule actually does. Equal ownership means no child was passed over. His wife has a place. A stepson who'd become part of his family and his business life has a place. The voting thresholds mean nobody can turn the ship alone. Professional management means the operating businesses don't become jobs for heirs. Transfer restrictions mean the holding company can't be pulled apart in a bad year.
Every one of those is a protection. And every one of them has a price, which is the part that doesn't fit in a pie chart.
If I were Luca or Paola, fair would mean being able to walk away from an investment I no longer want. If I were Leonardo Maria, it would mean handing more responsibility to whoever is most committed to holding the thing together. If I were Rocco, it would mean being allowed to keep what I was given without the structure eating the family alive. And if I were running EssilorLuxottica, I'd want all of this kept far away from the operating company.
The annoying part was that I could understand all of them.
That changed how I think about the work. A founder spends forty years making decisions from one chair, and then we ask him to design a system for people who will sit in four or five different ones. One child wants to run it. One wants liquidity. One cares about keeping the ownership together and one cares about being free to leave. Pick a single successor and you get clarity plus resentment. Split it evenly and you get inclusion plus paralysis. Protect the company and you can make family life harder; protect the family and you can weaken the company. I've stopped presenting these as problems to be solved, because I don't think there's a version that solves all of it. Pretending otherwise is how families end up with documents nobody believes in.
What Leonardo did was choose his risks. He made it hard for one heir to take over. He put a wall between family ownership and professional management. He put the major assets somewhere one person couldn't dismantle. Those choices held.
The problems he didn't solve only became visible once he wasn't in the room. An heir wants out. Another wants control. Equal ownership protects inclusion and makes agreement harder. And a rule written to keep a family together can end up being the thing that makes someone feel trapped inside it.
I started reading about this because a friend sent me a reel about a wealthy family fighting. I stayed with it because I couldn't understand the 12.5 per cent. I still don't know whether eight equal shares were fair, but I've stopped thinking that's the interesting question. What I keep coming back to is what those eight equal shares were built to protect, and whether anyone in that family ever heard it said out loud.
That's where I'd start with your family. Before the percentages, before the trusts, before who gets what:
What are we actually trying to protect?
And which problems are we willing to leave to the people who come next?
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Continue the Story
EssilorLuxottica Annual Reports and Governance Documents — the ownership structure, the governance model, and the relationship between family ownership and professional management after Leonardo's death.
Reuters — reporting on the family dispute, the attempted buyout, and the continuing governance of Delfin.
Financial Times — coverage of the succession, family governance, and the ownership dispute.
The Economist — analysis of founder-led businesses, family capitalism, and why governance usually determines whether an enterprise survives its founder.
Family Enterprise Canada and Family Enterprise Foundation — research on governance, stewardship, ownership transitions, and what family shareholders owe each other.
CAFÉ MANSHA | Issue No. 1
