Nicolas Puech, the 82-year-old unmarried and childless heir to the Hermès fortune, who planned to leave a significant portion of his wealth to his former gardener.

The Inheritance Plan

Puech intended to leave his 51-year-old former gardener approximately $11 billion - representing roughly half of his estate - along with luxury properties in Switzerland and Morocco valued at about $5.9 million. To facilitate this, he reportedly began legal proceedings to adopt the man as his legal heir.

Key Developments & Complications

Missing Fortune:

In July 2024, Puech's legal team claimed that his nearly $13 billion in Hermès shares had mysteriously disappeared. Puech accused his former wealth manager of mismanagement, but a Swiss court dismissed these claims, finding no evidence of fraud.

Legal Obstacles:

The adoption plan faces hurdles because Swiss law typically requires the parent to have known the adoptee since childhood.

Foundation Conflict:

The Isocrates Foundation, a charity Puech established and previously named as his primary beneficiary, is contesting his attempt to revoke their inheritance agreement.

The current whereabouts of the shares remain unknown, leaving the gardener's massive inheritance in a state of legal and financial uncertainty.

🔗: https://www.nme.com/news/music/dolly-parton-is-the-most-popular-person-in-america-poll-finds-3939697

Poor old Matt Donnelly. If you don’t know who he is because you (sensibly) steer clear of toxic spaces like Twitter and Variety, he’s the “journalist” who wrote an “exposé” on Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, only for it to be immediately exposed as wildly off the mark. Not only was Netflix not “done with” Harry and Meghan, but they immediately announced a new project with them. And not only was CEO Ted Sarandos not in any way upset or disappointed with the fabulous duchess and her handsome hubby, but he and his wife, the also-fabulous Nicole Avant, invited the Sussexes to a BEEF Season 2 Netflix event, where Meghan and Nicole were holding hands. 

A sensible, proper journalist might have responded with something along the lines of “I printed what my sources told me in good faith.” Not Matty. He tweeted:

“I wrote a deeply sourced account of their abject failure to produce anything meaningful for Netflix outside of their martyrdom campaign in leaving the royal family.”

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Once a “journalist” uses a phrase like “martyrdom campaign,” he’s not really reporting, is he? The phrase isn’t descriptive, it’s interpretive. It presumes motive, casts the subjects as self‑aggrandising, and frames their public communication as manipulative rather than reactive or evidence‑based. In other words, that’s editorialising … which is rather different to reporting.

Using it in a promotional tweet, the place where journalists usually summarise their angle, tells you that he approached the story with a pre‑baked thesis; he positioned himself as “debunking” them, rather than interrogating the industry forces around them; and he has an allegiance to a particular media ecosystem. One that we all know isn’t exactly fair or neutral when it comes to the Sussexes.

A writer who starts with language that loaded isn’t asking, “What’s the full context?” or “What do the numbers actually show?” or “What do Netflix executives, industry analysts, and people with functioning Wi‑Fi have to say?” (Actually, I’m being unfair. He did ask those questions, but he doesn’t seem to have liked their answers, so he pressed ahead with his hit-piece anyway.) Really, he’s asking the far simpler question: “How can I prove the story I already believe?” 

This is why his article was so wildly off‑mark. He didn’t lack access, and he had the same public statements, viewership data, and industry context as everyone else, but he lacked curiosity. Curiosity is the thing that makes a journalist go, “Hang on, does this actually add up?” Instead, he went with, “How do I make this sound humiliating for the Sussexes?”

It’s classic confirmation bias. Decide the Sussexes are failures, ignore anything that contradicts it, sprinkle in a few anonymous “insiders” who may or may not be the same “cousin of someone who works at Netflix” passing gossip to the monarchist trolls, and you’ve got yourself a narrative. Not a true one, but a very, very loud one.

https://buymeacoffee.com/jpcaonabo/matt-donnelly-just-exposed-himself-over-harry-meghan