The billionaire who wants to be a saint

 


Pierre-Édouard Stérin, 50, is a French entrepreneur and billionaire known for his investments in the restaurant and technology industries.

He told Le Point: "Like every Christian, my goal is to become a saint. I know it takes effort. I'm still far from achieving it". Stérin is a faithful of the Roman Mass.

A few years ago, he wondered if he should stop working after making a lot of money and play golf all day. But he decided to make money to do good.

80% of his time is devoted to business, through his investment structure, Otium Capital: "I continue to invest and create businesses to make money, because that's what I do best."

He devotes the remaining 20% to doing good, notably through the Common Good Fund, a philanthropic institution he launched in 2021. He has also recently founded Pericles, a political and metapolitical structure.

He describes himself as "a man of the right, economically liberal and socially conservative".

Through Pericles, he intends to finance a series of entrepreneurial initiatives to make these ideas even more popular, "so that one day we will have political representatives capable of implementing a liberal-conservative plan at the head of the country".

The legal framework in France prohibits any legal entity from funding a political figure or party. Pericles therefore focuses on creating and supporting civic initiatives and entrepreneurial projects, such as think tanks and training institutes.

"I have never financed Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour" because, apart from the issue of immigration, he has few convictions in common with the National Front: "In economic and social terms, we are even very far apart".

He calls George Soros "a source of inspiration - or rather anti-inspiration!"

Stérin has lived in Belgium for ten years to avoid the "suffocating level of taxation" in France: "I left France reluctantly to better serve my country," he says.

He did it because "if I stayed in France, they'd 'rob' me without doing anything with my money. What I save in taxes, I give back to my country through philanthropy".

In 2024, for example, Stérin donated 60 million euros to the Common Good Fund and kept 300,000 euros, "with which I live very comfortably".

He gives 200 times more than he takes for himself: "This payment is only possible because I live in Belgium." Stérin doesn't want the French state to fund projects that are, for the most part, completely ineffective.

Asked whether we can do politics like we do business, he replies: "France's last balanced budget was in 1974. Imagine a company losing money every year for fifty years..."

And: "This situation would have been impossible if France had been managed with precise objectives, with better teams".

He refers to France's economic situation, its security situation and its national education system: "Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that the vast majority of people who enter politics are mediocre."


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