Chanel to Sponsor the Boat Race
In its first ever sports sponsorship, Chanel has chosen the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race that takes place every Spring on the Thames in Putney. The sponsorship deal is said to be worth around £500,000.
The Chanel brand is associated by many people with its founder, Coco Chanel. Today Chanel is privately owned by the Wertheimer family unlike many of its rivals that are publicly owned. The history is interesting.
Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel was a talented designer and created the company before WW1. In 1924, she made a deal with the Wertheimer brothers (who owned Bourjois) and another businessman in which the Wertheimers would invest heavily to expand and sell Chanel No 5 perfume globally under the 'Parfums Chanel' business. Coco Chanel retained 10% of the shares.
They were successful and Chanel resented her minority stake. During WW2, French intelligence documents described Chanel as a "vicious antisemite" who praised Hitler. With the Nazi seizure of all Jewish-owned property and business enterprises, Chanel decided to take the opportunity to gain the full monetary fortune generated by Parfums Chanel and its most profitable product, Chanel No. 5. The directors of Parfums Chanel, the Wertheimers, were Jewish. Chanel used her position as an "Aryan" to petition German officials to legalise her claim to sole ownership.
But the Wertheimers were a step ahead of her, anticipating the forthcoming Nazi mandates against Jews, and had legally turned over control of Parfums Chanel in May 1940 to Félix Amiot, a Christian French businessman and industrialist. At the end of the war, Amiot returned Parfums Chanel to the hands of the Wertheimers.
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| Coco Chanel and Pierre Wertheimer (date unknown) |
Chanel spent most of the war living in the Ritz, socialising and frequenting the top ranking Nazis who stayed there, so there can be little doubt where her sympathies lay. After the war, her position was weakened by her behaviour and she went into hiding in Switzerland, rightly afraid of what the French would do to her. This didn't stop her continuing her battle with the Wertheimer brothers which became a protracted legal fight.
Ultimately, the Wertheimers and Chanel came to a mutual agreement, renegotiating the original 1924 contract. On 17 May 1947, Chanel received wartime profits from the sale of Chanel No. 5, an amount equivalent to some US$12 million in 2022 valuation. Her future share would be two per cent of all Chanel No. 5 sales worldwide (projected to gross her $34 million a year as of 2022), making her one of the richest women in the world at the time the contract was renegotiated. In addition, Pierre Wertheimer agreed to an unusual stipulation proposed by Chanel herself: Wertheimer agreed to pay all of Chanel's living expenses—from the trivial to the large—for the rest of her life. She spent the last 30 years of her life living in the Paris Ritz!
Documents released 10 years ago leave little doubt that she was a Nazi collaborator through her lovers and her association with Nazi spies. She even worked for Walter Schellenberg, head of the Nazi Intelligence Agency.
Today the Wertheimer family still own Chanel which they have grown into an extraordinarily profitable business. At the end of 2023, Chanel employed more than 36,500 people worldwide.
The Biggest Number in the World?
$2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Google, like most good western companies, has withdrawn its services from Russia. In this instance it's YouTube, and various Russian pro-government organisations have been pursuing Google in court for the withdrawal of their services.
The fine that they are currently claiming that Google has to pay is such a large number that is equates to more than all the money that exists in our world!!
"Google has racked up some 2 undecillion rubles ($2.5 decillion) worth of fines in Russia after years of refusing to restore the accounts of pro-Kremlin and state-run media outlets, the RBC news website reported Tuesday, citing an anonymous source familiar with court rulings against the tech company.
According to RBC’s sources, Google began accumulating daily penalties of 100,000 rubles in 2020 after the pro-government media outlets Tsargrad and RIA FAN won lawsuits against the company for blocking their YouTube channels. Those daily penalties have doubled each week, leading to the current overall fine of around 2 undecillion rubles.
Undecillion is a number equal to 1 followed by 36 zeros. Google, whose parent company Alphabet reported a revenue of more than $307 billion in 2023, is unlikely to ever pay the incredibly high fine."
The Moscow Times 29th October 2024. Note that The Moscow Times has been designated an "undesirable" organisation by Russia's Prosecutor General's Office.
Google's name comes from the mathematical term a Googol. A googol is 10 to the 100th power, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. So perhaps there is some irony here?
“I can’t tell you how to get rich quickly; I can only tell you how to get poor quickly: by trying to get rich quickly.”
André Kostolany, Hungarian investor 1906 - 1999
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