On June 19, 2026, just before landing, a twin-motor Cessna 421 carrying Claude Guillemot crashed in a field close to La Baule-Escoublac Airport on the Atlantic coast of France. He was sixty-nine. The flight instructor with him also died. They were both described as skilled and certified pilots. There is an ongoing investigation.
The Guillemot family’s majority ownership of Ubisoft and Guillemot Corporation, the holding firm that owns the hardware and accessories brand Thrustmaster, were the main sources of his estimated $130 million to $150 million net worth at the time of his passing. The funds represented forty years of starting from scratch in rural Brittany, a part of France where no one would have predicted a multinational video game firm to establish itself in 1986.
That year, Claude and his four brothers—Yves, Michel, Gérard, and Christian—founded Ubisoft. The five brothers grew up on a farm in Carentoir, a small hamlet in the Morbihan province of Brittany. Before changing their focus to game development and publication, they began the company as a mail-order software company. The family structure that underpinned the company never really disappeared — the Guillemots maintained control through their combined holdings for decades, which became significant during activist investor campaigns and hostile takeover attempts that tested the family’s grip on the company in later years.
It is difficult to overstate the cultural impact of the portfolio Ubisoft developed when they were in charge. Setting games in medieval Europe, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, feudal Japan, and revolutionary Paris, among other places, Assassin’s Creed went on to become one of the best-selling action-adventure franchises in video game history. Just Dance turned the brand into a household name for an entirely different kind of player.
Tactical shooters that established a genre were made under the Tom Clancy license. One of the first franchises to show that the business could create unique intellectual property with real longevity was Rayman. None of these were unavoidable; rather, they were the outcome of decades of growth choices made in offices in Bordeaux, Paris, and Montreal.
Within the Guillemot family business, Claude concentrated on Guillemot Corporation rather than the day-to-day operations of Ubisoft, which were more directly under the CEO direction of his brother Yves. Guillemot Corporation’s Thrustmaster brand became well recognized among simulation gaming fans – racing wheels, flight sticks, gamepads utilized by people who take the hardware part of their activity seriously. Alongside Ubisoft’s much higher reputation, it operates fairly discreetly in a niche that produces substantial and steady cash.
What the Guillemot brothers created is difficult to adequately describe. Five siblings from a Brittany farming community started a business that eventually employed tens of thousands of people on several continents, published video games that have sold hundreds of millions of copies, and created intellectual property that has been turned into movies and television shows. The family preserved meaningful control of that company for forty years, which in the current environment of institutional shareholding and activist pressure is an unusual feat in its own right.
