If you own a pair of sunglasses, there’s a decent chance you’ve contributed, in some tiny way, to the enormous fortune of the Del Vecchio family.
- Ray-Ban? Luxottica.
- Oakley? Luxottica.
- Persol? Luxottica.
- Oliver Peoples? Luxottica.
- Sunglass Hut? Luxottica.
- LensCrafters? Luxottica.
Pearle Vision and Target Optical? Both are owned by Luxottica.
And then there are all the luxury fashion houses that have relied on Luxottica to manufacture their eyewear under licensing agreements over the years, including brands like Prada, Chanel, Giorgio Armani, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana.
Luxottica’s level of control over the eyewear industry has been criticized for decades as arguably monopolistic. The company didn’t just make the glasses. It bought major brands, controlled distribution and acquired many of the stores where consumers actually purchased the finished products.
And the man who built this incredible empire had about as unlikely an origin story as you could possibly imagine.
From An Orphanage To A $30 Billion Fortune
The man behind the empire was the late Leonardo Del Vecchio. Leonardo was born in Milan in 1935. His father died before Leonardo was born, leaving his mother desperately poor with several children to support.
When Leonardo was seven, his mother could no longer afford to raise him. She sent him to an orphanage.
Leonardo left the orphanage as a teenager and went to work as an apprentice metalworker. He learned engraving and toolmaking, attended design classes at night and eventually found work making components for eyeglass frames.
In 1961, at the age of 26, he moved to the small Italian town of Agordo and started his own company. He called it Luxottica.
Initially, the company manufactured components for other eyewear companies. But Del Vecchio eventually realized there was much more money to be made by controlling the entire process.
Luxottica began making complete frames. Then it took control of distribution. Then it began acquiring brands and retailers. Del Vecchio also grasped something that seems obvious today but was much less obvious decades ago: Eyeglasses didn’t have to be boring medical devices. They could be fashion accessories.
In 1988, Luxottica struck a licensing deal with Giorgio Armani. That became the template for an enormously lucrative business in which fashion companies could slap their prestigious names on eyewear without actually needing to become experts at manufacturing glasses.
Luxottica, meanwhile, kept buying brands it could own outright.
It acquired LensCrafters in 1995. Ray-Ban followed in 1999. Sunglass Hut came in 2001. Oakley was acquired for $2.1 billion in 2007.
Then came Del Vecchio’s ultimate act of vertical integration.
In 2018, Luxottica merged with French lens giant Essilor to create EssilorLuxottica. The company now controlled not just an extraordinary collection of frames, brands and retail outlets, but a massive piece of the global lens business as well.
Today, EssilorLuxottica is an absolute monster. It generated €28.5 billion in revenue in 2025, and its retail network has grown to nearly 20,000 locations around the world.
And all of that started with an orphaned Italian teenager working with pieces of metal.
An Incredible Inheritance
By the end of his life, Leonardo Del Vecchio had become one of the richest people in Europe. He even briefly overtook Nutella heir Giovanni Ferrero to become the richest person in Italy.
When Del Vecchio died in June 2022 at the age of 87, he was worth $30 billion.
Much of that fortune was held through a Luxembourg-based holding company called Delfin, which owns a huge stake in EssilorLuxottica as well as significant investments in banks, insurance companies and real estate.
And this is where the story gets especially interesting.
After Leonardo’s death, ownership of Delfin was ultimately divided into eight equal 12.5% stakes.
The beneficiaries were his six children
- Claudio
- Marisa
- Paola
- Leonardo Maria
- Luca
- Clemente
Plus
- His widow Nicoletta Zampillo
- Nicoletta’s son Rocco Basilico
The youngest beneficiary was Clemente Del Vecchio. He was 18 when Leonardo died. Thanks to his inheritance, Clemente essentially woke up one morning as the youngest billionaire in the world.
At the time, each 12.5% slice of Delfin was worth several billion dollars. Since then, the value of the family’s assets has grown significantly. Today, each heir is worth $5.5 billion apiece.
Not bad for an inheritance that traces directly back to a man whose mother once couldn’t afford to feed him.
Which brings us to one particular Del Vecchio heir. Not Clemente. His older half-brother, Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio.
Meet Leonardo Maria
Leonardo Maria is the son of Leonardo Del Vecchio and Nicoletta Zampillo. He is now 31 years old and owns the same 12.5% stake in Delfin as the other seven heirs. So he is worth $5.5 billion.
Unlike several members of the family, Leonardo Maria also became deeply involved in the actual eyewear business. He rose to become president of Ray-Ban and chief strategy officer of EssilorLuxottica before resigning from those positions in August 2026 amid a very public disagreement over the company’s direction and governance.
But that’s corporate drama.
The story that exploded this week is something else entirely.
A Soap Star And A Yellow Diamond
In July 2023, Leonardo Maria became engaged to actress and model Jessica Serfaty, who at the time was starring as Sloan Petersen on “Days of Our Lives.”
It was a very billionaire engagement.
Leonardo proposed at a restaurant on Italy’s Amalfi Coast with a large yellow diamond.
Serfaty told People that she and Leonardo had originally met at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. They crossed paths several times over the following years while both were in other relationships. Eventually, in 2023, Leonardo contacted her, asked whether she was single and the romance took off.
Within months, they were engaged.
Serfaty told People at the time that both wanted a family and described Leonardo as someone whose values and goals aligned with her own.
In May 2024, the couple appeared together at the Met Gala. Leonardo was still president of Ray-Ban, so naturally they both wore Ray-Bans.
From the outside, everything looked fairly spectacular: billionaire eyewear heir, actress fiancée, Met Gala, Amalfi Coast, gigantic yellow diamond.
Then things apparently went very, very wrong.
(Photo by Claudio Lavenia/Getty Images)
The Relationship Unravels
In July 2024, Serfaty publicly accused Leonardo Maria of abuse. She quickly retracted the accusation and claimed that her initial words were “driven by anger and not in truth.”
A month later, TMZ reported that Serfaty’s phone alerted her to an Apple AirTag apparently traveling with her Range Rover. Sheriff’s deputies searched the SUV but could not locate the device, and detectives opened an investigation into who was behind it. TMZ did not identify Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio as responsible for the alleged tracking.
Now fast-forward two years.
The Hollywood Reporter just published a bombshell investigation involving leaked audio recordings from a digital crisis operative named Jed Wallace.
And this is where the story gets wild.
The Leaked Audio
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the recordings consist of voice memos made by Wallace and shared with colleagues at the communications firm TAG PR as well as Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio.
Wallace has become a central figure in the growing controversy surrounding alleged covert reputation-management campaigns in Hollywood. His name has previously surfaced in litigation and reporting involving Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, among others.
According to THR, the newly obtained recordings appear to capture Wallace speaking directly to Del Vecchio in August 2024 – shortly after Serfaty’s abuse accusation and retraction.
In the recordings, Wallace allegedly explains a plan to damage Serfaty’s reputation online.
The strategy, as described by THR, involved creating an anonymous website filled with damaging claims about Serfaty and then using search-engine optimization and paid advertising to push that material higher in Google results.
Wallace allegedly described the goal as creating a lasting online narrative that would cause people encountering future stories about Serfaty to view her as dishonest and disreputable.
At one point in the recording, Wallace says:
“Wow, is it going to get fucking nasty for this girl.”
According to THR, the anti-Serfaty website went live on August 15, 2024. It has since been taken offline.
Perhaps the most important distinction here is what the recordings do not establish publicly.
THR’s story describes Wallace communicating with Del Vecchio about the apparent operation, but the published excerpts do not feature Del Vecchio himself ordering Wallace to create the site or instructing him to make specific false allegations.
Neither Del Vecchio nor Wallace responded to THR’s requests for comment.
And There’s Another Investigation
The leaked audio arrives against the backdrop of a separate and potentially much more serious legal matter in Italy.
In July 2026, Milan prosecutors asked that Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio and 73 others be sent to trial as part of the sprawling Equalize private-intelligence investigation. Prosecutors allege Del Vecchio was involved in commissioning unauthorized searches involving Serfaty as well as members of his own family amid the ongoing inheritance dispute.
Del Vecchio has denied knowingly requesting anything illegal and has maintained that he was unaware of any unlawful methods allegedly used to gather information. Equalize has also disputed aspects of the allegations and has said it did not work directly for him.
Those allegations have not been proven in court.
Still, when combined with THR’s newly published audio, they place one of Europe’s richest young heirs in the middle of an extraordinary story involving billions of dollars, a soap opera actress, an ugly breakup, alleged private investigators, anonymous websites and a Hollywood crisis operative discussing how to destroy someone’s reputation online.
And remember how this story began.
Leonardo Del Vecchio’s mother was so poor that she sent him to an orphanage because she couldn’t afford to raise him. He left that orphanage, became a metalworker, founded a tiny eyeglass-parts business and ultimately created an empire worth tens of billions of dollars.
Today, eight people each control a 12.5% slice of that empire worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $5-6 billion.
One of those people is Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio.
And right now, the Ray-Ban heir’s personal life is generating the kind of publicity that no amount of money can easily make disappear.
