French billionaire wants to give his $1.4bn fortune to charity, disinherits five children

Pierre-Edouard Sterin has told the French Senate he wants to disinherit his five children entirely. The law won’t let him.

French billionaire Pierre-Edouard Sterin appeared before France’s Senate last Thursday and made an argument that most parents would find extraordinary: he wants to disinherit his five children, give his entire fortune to charity, and have French lawmakers change the law so he can actually do it.

“I would like to give my entire estate to philanthropic causes,” he told senators during a public hearing. “I’m in favour of being able to do whatever one wants to do with one’s patrimony.”
The problem is that, under French law, he largely cannot.

France’s civil code enshrines a legal concept known as la réserve héréditaire, a protected inheritance provision that guarantees children a fixed minimum portion of any parent’s estate, regardless of what a will says. With five children, Sterin is legally obligated to leave at least three-quarters of his assets to his family. Only one quarter is freely disposable.

He is worth an estimated €1.3 billion, roughly $1.4 billion. Under the current framework, his children are legally entitled to inherit approximately €975 million. That is precisely the constraint he is asking the Senate to remove.

The principle has deep roots. Napoleon codified family inheritance protections into French law in the early nineteenth century, and the civil code has resisted the kind of testamentary freedom that countries like the United States and the United Kingdom have long allowed, where individuals may direct their entire estates to charity if they choose. Sterin’s appearance before the Senate marks the most high-profile public challenge to that tradition in recent memory.

Sterin, 52, is the co-founder of Smartbox, the gift experience company he built into a European market leader before selling it, a transaction that formed the primary basis of his fortune. He subsequently founded Otium Capital, an investment fund, and the Fondation du Bien Commun, his philanthropic vehicle.

His views on inheritance are not new. He told the French financial weekly Challenges in a prior interview that his children would not inherit anything, adding: “It’s a real freedom to start with nothing.” What is new is his willingness to take that private conviction into the public arena and put it on the Senate record.
A broader and more contested context

The inheritance hearing was not the main reason Sterin was called before the Senate. He appeared before an investigative commission examining the private financing of public policy, established under Senator Colombe Brossel, which has been scrutinising his Périclès project, a private initiative he launched in 2024 aimed at reinforcing right-wing political and cultural influence in France.

Sterin is one of France’s most publicly controversial billionaires. He describes himself as deeply conservative and is close to traditionalist Catholicism. The chief executive of his Otium Capital fund, François Durvye, is reported by multiple French media outlets to be a member of Marine Le Pen’s inner circle. In 2025, Sterin co-organised the Summit of Freedoms alongside right-wing media entrepreneur Vincent Bolloré, a gathering of conservative politicians and media figures. A New York Times investigation published in March 2026 described him as the billionaire funding France’s far right.

He had previously declined on two separate occasions in 2025 to appear before a lower-house parliamentary inquiry examining electoral organisation in France. Thursday’s Senate appearance, conducted via video conference, was his first engagement with French parliamentary oversight.

The French Senate is not currently considering any legislation to reform la réserve héréditaire, and Sterin’s statement was framed as a personal position rather than a formal legislative proposal. The argument for testamentary freedom cuts across standard political lines, and it is not inherently partisan to suggest that wealthy individuals should be able to direct their estates to philanthropy rather than compelled family inheritance. But the legal framework he is challenging is older than modern France itself, and there is no indication that Thursday’s testimony will be enough to move it.

What is clear is that Sterin has now put his name, his fortune and his Senate testimony behind a position that current French law makes impossible: that his five children should receive nothing, and that every euro of his €1.3 billion should go to causes he has chosen rather than to the family he has raised.