Françoise Bettencourt Meyers
Françoise Bettencourt Meyers is a French billionaire heiress and an author of Bible commentaries and works on Jewish-Christian relations. She is the only daughter and heiress of Liliane Bettencourt, and her family owns the company L'Oréal. She married Jean-Pierre Meyers, the grandson of a rabbi murdered at Auschwitz, and they decided to raise their children Jean-Victor and Nicolas as Jewish. Her marriage caused controversy because of her grandfather Eugène Schueller's trial for collaboration with the Nazi government; he was L'Oreal's founder.
In 2008, she sued François-Marie Banier for taking money from her mother, and she started proceedings to have her mother declared mentally incompetent. The revelations in the secret recordings that she used in evidence led to the Woerth-Bettencourt scandal. In December 2010, Bettencourt Meyers announced that she had settled out of court with both her mother and Banier. Her mother died in September 2017 when her net worth was about $39.5 billion, which makes Bettencourt Meyers among the top 20 richest people in the world. As of October 2019, she is the richest woman in the world, with an estimated fortune of $59.3 billion, according to Bloomberg.
After a fire severely damaged Notre-Dame de Paris, Bettencourt Meyers and L'Oréal donated $226 million to repair the cathedral.
