Agache intends to provide the second-tier Parisian club with the resources it needs for its economic and sporting development
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Agache, the holding company of LVMH founder and Chief Executive Bernard Arnault ’s family, is in exclusive talks to buy a majority stake in storied soccer club Paris FC, extending one of Europe’s richest families’ foray into sports.
Agache said in a statement Thursday that the Arnault family is teaming up with Austrian energy-drink maker Red Bull, which is currently negotiating a minority stake in the second-tier Parisian club.
While Red Bull will be involved with the sporting element in an advisory function, the Arnault family intends to provide the club with the resources its needs for its economic and sporting development.
Though the move would be the family’s first step into soccer, Red Bull is already heavily invested in the sport with stakes in top-level clubs in Germany, Austria and the U.S.
Through LVMH, however, the family has ramped up its sports involvement and sponsorships recently.
Earlier this month, the company struck a 10-year partnership deal with Formula One, capitalising on the sport’s global ascendance. And this summer, LVMH brands were hard to miss at the Paris Olympics after the luxury-goods maker paid roughly 150 million euros to be a sponsor of the global event.
With the controlling stake in Paris FC, the family aims to establish both the men’s and women’s side among the elite of French football, Agache said.
“With the arrival of Agache as the club’s majority shareholder, the club will take on a new dimension with new goals and criteria for success,” it said.
The current owner of Paris FC, Pierre Ferracci, will remain president, Agache said. Antoine Arnault will be Agache’s representative on the club’s board of directors.
Paris FC, founded in 1969, returned to professional ranks in 2015 after spending four decades in the amateur leagues. It hasn’t been a part of France’s top flight league since the late 1970s, but currently sits at the top of the second-best division in the French leagues.
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Meta is betting on a human-first AI future, but growing legal battles and declining public trust are putting Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to the test.
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“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”
That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.
spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”
That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.
“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”
Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”
The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.
But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.
The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.
There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.
Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.
Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.
