French luxury design giant Hermes owner Nicolas Puech has announced he will adopt his gardener and make him the official heir to a portion of his wealth worth $11 billion. With this move, Puech is among the super rich owners who made surprising decisions to bequeath their fortunes.
According to a report by Swiss publication Tribune de Genève, Puech has already given his property in Morocco and a villa in Switzerland to his 51-year-old gardener, which is worth $6 million.
Puech has an ownership of 5.7 per cent of the brand, and is the fifth-generation heir of Thierry Hermes, who had founded the brand in 1837.
Here are other super wealthy individuals who chose heir that left everyone stunned.
1. In 2007, Portuguese citizen Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral de Camara left his properties including bank accounts, 12-room apartment in Lisbon, luxury car and two bikes to a group of 70 people whose names he had randomly picked from a phone book a decade before his death, Forbes reported.
2. In the 1920s, a Canadian lawyer left a significant portion of his estate to a trust that would eventually be liquidated 10 years after his death and given to a Toronto woman who gave birth to the most children between 1926 and 1936. Four mothers benefited from this unique will, each getting $110,000 (worth ₹91.63 lakh today).
3. A Wisconsin resident named Archibald McArthur died in 1922, leaving just $5 to his family members. Shockingly, he left the remaining money, roughly $3 million today, to a man he had once befriended on a park bench.
4. Wellington Burt, one of the wealthiest in Michigan, passed on his wealth to his family, but only after a century since his death. He had included a provision in his will that the $110 million wealth won’t pass on until 21 years after the death of his last surviving grandchild.
5. This year, Geoffrey Holt, the caretaker of a mobile home park in New Hampshire, died in June. He left his $3.8 million fortune to the town of Hinsdale, where he lived all his life, New York Times reported.