Serge Dassault

Serge Dassault ( ; born 4 April 1925) is a French entrepreneur (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Dassault Group) and conservative politician. According to Forbes magazine, As of|2010|lc=on he was the 96th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $9.3 billion.

Biography
Early life
Serge Dassault is the son of Marcel Dassault, from whom he inherited the Dassault Group and Madeline Dassault (née Minckes). Both his parents are of Jewish heritage but later converted to Roman Catholicism. Since the elder Dassault's death, he has continued developing the company, with the help of current CEO Charles Edelstenne.

He studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, the École polytechnique, Supaéro and HEC Paris. During the Second World War, he was jailed when his father was sent to Buchenwald for refusing to cooperate with the Germans in the airplane industry.

Career
His group also owns Groupe Le Figaro.

He is a member of the Union for a Popular Movement political party, as is his son Olivier, who is a deputy in the French National Assembly. He is a former mayor of the city of Corbeil-Essonnes, a southern suburb of Paris. In 2005, he inaugurated the 200-million-euro Islamic cultural center (comprising a mosque) in his city of Corbeil-Essonnes. In December 1998, he was sentenced to two years' probation in the Belgian Agusta scandal, and was fined 60,000 Belgian francs (about €1,500).

In 2004, he became a senator, and in this position, he has been an outspoken advocate of conservative positions on economic and employment issues, claiming that France's taxes and workforce regulations ruin its entrepreneurs. In November 2012, responding to the Ayrault government's plan to legalise gay marriage, he controversially said, during an interview for France Culture, that authorising gay marriage would lead to there being 'no more renewal of the population. [...] We'll have a country of homosexuals. And so in ten years there'll be nobody left. It's stupid'.

Personal life
Dassault married Nicole Raffel on 5 July 1950. They have four children: Olivier, Laurent, Thierry, and Marie-Hélène.