The “World’s Richest Cat,” Karl Lagerfeld’s Choupette, May Actually be Broke
The inheritance drama of Lagerfeld's will has stretched on for seven years at this point, with seemingly no end in sight.
Photo via Getty Images, Anthony Ghnassia Splinter Karl Lagerfeld
For the majority of the animal’s existence, the best-known thing about fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld’s famed cat Choupette was that the now 14-year-old blue-cream Birman was likely one of the planet’s most outlandishly pampered pets. After the eccentric designer acquired her in late 2011 from one of his model proteges, until the time of his passing from cancer in 2019, the cat effectively became the light of his life, and the closest thing that Lagerfeld possessed to a significant other. His personal pronouncements about Choupette frequently bordered on the comical, as he called her things such as “the center of the world.” With Choupette, Lagerfeld seemed to discover a form of adoration he didn’t even know existed in his near 80 years on Earth to that point, saying, among other things: “I never thought that I could fall in love with an animal like this. If you saw her, you would understand.”
The superlatives and excess surrounded Choupette on all sides through her time with Lagerfeld. She reportedly had not one but two personal maids, one for day and one for night. She ate “chef-prepared meals off the best china” and accompanied her owner on private jets, and was often described as the world’s richest cat. Lagerfeld claimed at one point that Choupette made $4 million in a single year through modeling appearances, commercials and photoshoots, although this should no doubt be understood as brands paying for access to Lagerfeld himself. Still, there can be no doubting the man’s genuinely intense infatuation and fascination with Choupette the animal. He was so obsessed with her, in fact, that the aforementioned housemaids were reportedly tasked with literally journaling everything Choupette did each day by hand, creating diaries that Lagerfeld could leaf through later to vicariously live through her day. There are apparently hundreds upon hundreds of pages of these diaries, floating around somewhere, their ownership now unclear.
But then Lagerfeld passed away, and the gravy train more or less came to an end for Choupette. Although countless clickbait headlines of the era trumpeted rumors that Choupette would be inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars, with a huge chunk of the icon’s estate reserved for his beloved companion, the truth has proven to be considerably more complicated and thorny not just for the cat, but all the human beneficiaries named in Lagerfeld’s will. In fact, according to more recent reporting in the form of a sprawling Atlantic piece on Choupette’s life and an International Business Times follow-up today, it’s entirely possible that not a single named beneficiary has actually received one dollar from the estate, despite the fact that Lagerfeld has now been dead for more than seven years. Instead, it seems his fortune–and there’s much debate about how large that fortune truly is at this point–seems to still be tied up in an arcane battle with French tax authorities.
being given a cat with $1.5M would solve a lot of my problems right now
— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) 3:26 PM · May 31, 2026
But still, Choupette remains. It feels odd on some level that, seven years after the death of her owner, Choupette should still be around, but she seems to be decently spry for a 14-year-old senior cat. Since Lagerfeld’s death, Choupette has lived with the family of one of the aforementioned former housemaids, Françoise Caçote, a person who obviously spent many hours with the cat while Lagerfeld was still around, and was reportedly chosen by the fashion icon as the person who should care for her when he was gone. While Lagerfeld lingered in the hospital, Caçote would reportedly smuggle Choupette in to visit her ailing, devoted owner. But for going on seven years now, the cat has been living a decidedly more humble, far more mundane existence than when she was jetting around the world at Lagerfeld’s side. Director Michael Waldman, who made the documentary The Mysterious Mr. Lagerfeld for British TV in 2023, at one point visited Caçote’s home to provide an update on Choupette for the film, describing it as a “nice-enough apartment” that may or may not have been purchased by Lagerfeld himself, where the cat now resides with Caçote, her teenage son, and her husband, a “salt-of-the-earth” man “bemused by this mad world that his wife had got herself into and more than tolerant of this extraordinarily beautiful cat.”
One thing that is widely reported about the Lagerfeld will, which is not public, is that at least some direct allowance was made for Françoise Caçote, given that she was meant to be Choupette’s caretaker–unlike so much that was reported around the time of the man’s death, an animal can not actually be bequeathed anything under French law. According to Caçote, though, she has to date received precisely nothing on that front: The estate continues to be roiled by more drama and legal wrangling, such as the emergence of a mystery plaintiff in February who challenged the legality of the will, potentially resulting in the estate diverting to family members that Lagerfeld had effectively cut out of his life decades earlier. Choupette could potentially be sidestepped entirely.
“I want to be completely transparent: today, we have received absolutely nothing,” said Caçote in a written statement to The Atlantic, to whom she seemingly did not speak in person. “Given the situation’s complexity, I have had to hire expensive lawyers to claim the inheritance in my name and ensure that Karl’s wishes are properly respected. While things are being sorted out, I’m doing my best to honor his wishes, especially that Choupette wants for nothing. That’s my top priority. In addition to caring for her, I work part-time to support her. She receives all the love, attention, and care she needs. The most important thing is that she’s happy, surrounded by love and affection, and protected as Karl would have wanted. We remain hopeful that the situation will one day be resolved peacefully.”
That’s nice. Isn’t that nice? Here, though, is the thing that one might forget in the course of exploring such a kooky story: We are talking about a fucking domestic housecat here, not a faulty nuclear reactor. Choupette, icon to a certain corner of the fashion and social media world though she may be, is a CAT, and a small family living in a Parisian flat probably doesn’t explicitly need access to millions of dollars in funds in order to continue giving a housecat a comfortable existence. They’ve somehow managed to care for this cat for seven years, in fact. Do they deserve to eventually get whatever was stipulated in the will? Sure, but I very much doubt that, seven years after Lagerfeld’s passing, Choupette is throwing nightly tantrums if her wet food isn’t coming out in a Waterford cystal goblet. Oh, you work “part-time to support her”? Yeah, that sounds pretty much like pet ownership, and that’s the sentiment of someone who literally owns three cats of his own. At no point, by the way, have I struggled to wonder how I will provide for those cats without the aid of “expensive lawyers,” but what do I know? Maybe my cats are secretly miserable that they’ve never seen the interior of a Gulfstream private jet.
If Choupette deserves anything in particular, in fact, I would argue that it’s probably the opportunity to retire and be an old fucking housecat in peace, now that she’s well into her senior years. The piece in The Atlantic goes deep into the continuing employment of a now creaky and cranky Choupette, whether that’s threatening to tear Kim Kardashian’s face open during a photoshoot, or hawking consumer goods via her official Instagram account, when they can cajole her into appearing for photo shoots. Half the time? They reportedly use stand-in cats, rather than Choupette, given that she rarely displays much interest in playing along. At what point would one say that this animal has given enough to have earned a peaceful retirement in her old age? Surely, even when she’s obviously no longer earning millions of dollars via modeling, a few of those photoshoots can buy enough Purina and Churu to wile away her remaining years. You’re never going to convince me that “providing for a cat” is a tremendous burden.
Lol imagine being so out of touch with reality that you think you can make a cat do anything it doesn’t want to do
— Booniss Everdrunk (@bookiesnacksize.bsky.social) 6:55 AM · May 24, 2026
The best thing for Choupette, at the end of the day, is almost certainly if we never really hear about Choupette again, because she’s simply being left alone to a life of humble comfort. Lagerfeld’s will may remain unsettled, but his wishes for his beloved cat? Those are easy to fulfill. Let the grand old dame pass out of the public eye and be at peace.
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