Serge Dassault

Serge Dassault (French: [sɛʁʒ daso]; 4 April 1925 – 28 May 2018) was a French billionaire heir, businessman and politician. He was the chairman and chief executive officer of Dassault Group, and a conservative politician.

According to Forbes, Dassault's net worth was estimated in 2016 at US$15 billion.

Spouse - Nicole Raffel, ​(m. 1950)​

Children

Olivier Dassault
Laurent Dassault
Thierry Dassault
Marie-Hélène Dassault

Parents

Marcel Dassault
Madeline Minckes

Early life and education

Serge Dassault was the son of Madeline Dassault (née Minckes) and Marcel Dassault, from whom he inherited the Dassault Group. Both his parents were of Jewish heritage, but later converted to Roman Catholicism.

His father founded the Dassault Aviation in 1929.

During the Second World War, he was jailed when his father was sent to Buchenwald for refusing any cooperation from his company, Bordeaux-Aéronautique, directed by Henri Déplante, André Curvale and Claude de Cambronne, with the German aviation industry.

He studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly. He earned engineering degrees from the École Polytechnique (class of 1946) and Supaéro (class of 1951). In 1963, he received an Executive MBA from HEC Paris.

Business career

After the elder Dassault's death in 1986, Serge Dassault continued developing the company, with the help of CEOs Charles Edelstenne and Éric Trappier. His group also owned the newspaper Le Figaro. In December 1998, he was sentenced to two years' probation in the Belgian Agusta scandal, and was fined 60,000 Belgian francs (about €1,500).

Political career

He was a member of the Union for a Popular Movement political party, as was his son Olivier, who was a deputy in the National Assembly. He was a former mayor of the city of Corbeil-Essonnes, a southern suburb of Paris.

In 2004, he became a senator, and in that position, he was an outspoken advocate of conservative positions on economic and employment issues, claiming that France's taxes and workforce regulations ruin its entrepreneurs. In 2005, he inaugurated the €2 million Islamic cultural centre (comprising a mosque) in his city of Corbeil-Essonnes. 

In November 2012, responding to the Ayrault government's plan to legalise same-sex marriage, he controversially said, during an interview for France Culture, that authorising it would cause "no more renewal of the population. [...] We'll have a country of homosexuals. And so in ten years there'll be nobody left. It's stupid".

Personal life and death

Dassault married Nicole Raffel on 5 July 1950. They had four children: Olivier, Laurent, Thierry, and Marie-Hélène. He died suddenly at his office at the Dassault group headquarters in Paris on 28 May 2018, from heart failure at the age of 93.