Parisian pirate joins establishment

Xavier Niel, a former hacker and sex-line operator, is a telecoms maverick who has been shaking up corporate France for decades. Now he’s having a tilt at Vodafone. Jane Lewis reports

Having spent the past three decades building up a vast network of interests in the European telecoms sector, French billionaire Xavier Niel is in pole position to exploit the industry’s ongoing consolidation. “For me, it’s like playing Monopoly,” he says. But, of late, things haven’t been going entirely to plan.

Niel, who holds a 2.5% stake in Vodafone, had been hoping to grab the UK telco’s Italian offshoot for his privately-held behemoth, Iliad. But he has twice been thwarted, says The Sunday Times. Rather than accepting his latest €10.45bn offer, Vodafone’s CEO Margherita Della Valle plumped for Swisscom’s €8bn offer instead. The Swiss deal “was simpler, offered more up-front cash and was less likely to be delayed by regulators”. Niel isn’t convinced. “They are losing €2bn,” he says. “Being a shareholder, I’m not sure my money is well managed.”

Niel, an accomplished empire-builder whose other interests include a controlling stake in the French newspaper Le Monde, has his fingers in many other soufflés. But the snub won’t sit well with a man once described by Forbes as “France’s Steve Jobs”. In his home country Niel, 55, is better known as “The Pirate”, says The Connexion – a reference to a colourful early career as a hacker, sex-line operator, and part-owner of a chain of peep shows.

One of these was “later found to be a front for prostitution” and in 2004 he spent four weeks in jail for concealing the misuse of some €200,000 in corporate funds. But these days France’s bad-boy tycoon is part of the establishment. He lives with Delphine Arnault, the daughter of LVMH’s founder Bernard Arnault. And he’s a friend of President Emmanuel Macron.

Internet pioneer

Born in 1967, the son of a patent director in a pharmaceutical company and a bookkeeper, Niel grew up in the Parisian suburb of Créteil. An average student, who dropped out of school at 17, his career trajectory was set when he received a Sinclair ZX81 computer as a Christmas present when he was 14. “It changed my life,” he later told TV network La Chaîne parlementaire, because it gave him “control”. Niel forged his father’s signature to get a second phone line installed giving him access to Minitel (an early French computer network), allowing him to form

Minitel Rose – a sex-chat service that became one of the most lucrative on the network. He also honed his skills as a hacker. After being caught hacking into the French channel Canal+, he claims to have been recruited to work undercover for France’s internal security service.

By 1993, Niel was out of the Minitel looking to establish his own network, says Forbes. He set up Worldnet, France’s first internet service provider (ISP) “three years before his sworn enemy France Telecom got in on the action” and sold it at the height of the dotcom froth for more than $50m. In his next venture, Free, he came up with the then novel idea of combining internet, TV and phone in one tidy package, dubbed the Freebox.

He became notorious for staging Applestyle launch events at which “he would snipe at his incumbent rivals”, says The Sunday Times. Niel won plenty of fans, known as “freenauts”, but was loathed by the establishment, which sought for years to block him – in vain. Free is still the French centrepiece of Niel’s Iliad empire.

Today worth $10bn, Niel has been lauded for bringing a “West Coast attitude” to European business, but remains at heart a maverick. A favourite hobby is “exploring the catacombs of Paris”. He claims his next mission is to establish France as a hub for the AI sector. He might have joined the establishment, says The Connexion, but his instinct is still to move fast and break things, once observing that he’d like to have “casseur de monopoles” inscribed on his tombstone – the monopoly smasher.

“He has been praised for bringing a West Coast attitude to European business”