Xavier Niel Biography
Xavier Niel is a French Billionaire Businessman, Active in the Telecommunications and Technology Industry, and best known as the founder and majority shareholder of the French Internet service provider and Mobile operator Iliad trading under the Free brand (France’s second-largest ISP, and third mobile operator).
He is also co-owner of the newspaper Le Monde, co-owner of the rights of the song “My Way” and owner of Monaco Telecom, Salt Mobile SA, and Eir. He is chairman and chief strategy officer for Iliad, but also a board member of KKR and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.
10 Quick Facts About Xavier Niel
- Name: Xavier Niel
- Age: 53 years old as of 2019
- Birthday: 25 August
- Zodiac Sign: Virgo
- Height: Average
- Nationality: French
- Occupation: Billionaire Businessman
- Marital Status: Married
- Salary: To be updated
- Net worth: $ 9.5 billion
Xavier Niel Age and Birthday
Niel is 53 years old as of 2019, he was born on 25 August 1967. He celebrates his birthday on 25 August every year and his birth sign is Virgo.
Xavier Niel Height and Weight
Niel stands at an average height. He appears to be quite tall in his photos, relative to his surroundings, are anything to go by. However, details regarding his actual height and other body measurements are currently not publicly available. We will update this section when the information is available.
Xavier Niel Education
He studied in the 12th arrondissement of Paris at the Saint-Michel-de-Picpus Catholic private high school.
Xavier Niel Family- Parents and Siblings
Niel was born into a middle-class family; his father is a jurist in a pharmaceutical laboratory, and his mother is an accountant. He was born and raised by his parents in France. Our efforts to find out more about his family came to no avail as no such information is publicly available. Thus, the identity of Xavier’s parents is still unclear. It is also not known if he has any siblings. We will update this section once this information is available.
Xavier Niel Partner, Wife
Xavier’s partner or wife is Delphine Arnault, a billionaire in her own right and also the daughter of the richest man in France, Bernard Arnault. He has a daughter with her and two sons from a previous relationship and lives in Paris.
Xavier Niel’s Net worth and Fortune
Xavier has an estimated net worth of 9.5 billion USD as of 2020. This includes his assets, money, and income. His primary source of income is his career as a Technology entrepreneur. Through his various sources of income, he has been able to accumulate a good fortune but prefers to lead a modest lifestyle.
Xavier Niel Measurements and Facts
Here are some interesting facts and body measurements you should know about Xavier Niel
Xavier Niel Wiki
- Full Names: Xavier Niel
- Popular As: Xavier Niel
- Gender: Male
- Occupation / Profession: French businessman
- Nationality: France
- Race / Ethnicity: White
- Religion: Christian
- Sexual Orientation: Straight
Xavier Niel Birthday
- Age / How Old?: 53 years
- Zodiac Sign: Virgo
- Date of Birth: 25 August 1967
- Place of Birth: Créteil, France
- Birthday: 25 August
Xavier Niel Body Measurements
- Body Measurements: To be updated soon
- Height / How Tall?: Average
- Weight: Moderate
- Eye Color: Brown
- Hair Color: Brown
- Shoe Size: To be updated soon
Xavier Niel Family and Relationship
- Father (Dad): Michel Niel
- Mother: Camille Fernande Perrot
- Siblings (Brothers and Sisters): To be updated soon
- Marital Status: Married
- Wife/Spouse: Married to Delphine Arnault,
- Children: Elisa Niel
Xavier Niel Networth and Salary
- Net Worth: 9.5 billion USD as of 2020
- Salary: Under Review
- Source of Income: French businessman
Xavier Niel House and Cars
- Place of living: France
- Cars: Car brand to be updated soon
Xavier Niel Accident
An assassination disguised as suicide, a fake car accident: in The Economist, the boss of the service provider Free imagines what could happen to him soon. Paranoia? No, humor, he explains to Eco89. But Xavier Niel is convinced that we want to eliminate him from the telecoms market. Xavier Niel adds that in 2004 already, a leader of TF1 (whom he does not name) promised to “nail him to a wall”.
The boss of Iliad, the parent company of Free, likes shattering statements and cultivates his image of a desperado. But in the midst of a war on the French telecoms market, his words in The Economist are already making the rounds on the web.
Xavier Niel is the Iliad Group’s majority shareholder and founder. He has been involved in the data communications, Internet, and telecommunications industry since the late 1980s. In 1993, before dedicating himself full-time to developing the Group, he founded Worldnet, the first Internet service provider in France, which was sold toKaptech (LDCom Group) in December 2000.
He has been responsible for the Group’s major strategic developments, from the launch of the ANNU service and the development of Internet access services based on France Télécom’s repayment scheme as a financial model to the launch of the Freebox project.
Xavier Niel and Macron
Xavier Niel definitely is a telecom magnate worth $6.7 billion, and the 8th-richest person in France. He’s also spent hundreds of millions of his personal fortune trying to transform the country’s button-down business culture into a hotbed for young entrepreneurs who can follow in his footsteps.
The biggest splurges: $50 million on a free coding school in Paris in 2013, and $300 million to launch Station F, the world’s biggest startup incubator, in June 2017. Station F covers an area the size of six American football fields and has 1,000 startups working under one roof.
Outside it, construction workers are busy building a restaurant, a couple of hotels, and three apartment blocks for 600 entrepreneurs to live in. That will cost more. How much? “A few hundred [million] more,” says the still-grinning billionaire, sturdily-built and sporting long hair that flicks out below his ears.
He’s standing in the lobby of Station F next to a large rainbow-colored sculpture by Jeff Koons called Play-doh, which cost him an estimated $20 million. Niel is on first-name terms with the young president of France, Emmanuel Macron. (He even offers, before Forbes’ planned interview with Macron, to text the head of state to push things along.)
The pair have made a fizzy combination for a country that’s struggled to reconcile its loyalty to state protection, with the need to embrace disruptive business models. In the past 12 months, Macron has kicked France into high gear by loosening labor laws and calling the French “open to disruption.”
But before that, Niel spent years growing a new, local establishment of entrepreneurs. He’s backed more than 400 startups. “He literally invests in a startup every day,” says Loïc Le Meur, the founder of LeWeb conference, and built a techie’s version of a grande école with 42 and the Station F campus. Juxtaposed with all the closed-door rhetoric from Trump and Brexit-destined Britain, France’s stereotype as a bad place to do business is getting flipped on its head.
The groundwork for all this goes pretty far back. In the 1980s, France already had the ingredients to become a tech entrepreneur’s mecca, including the internet before anyone else. Before Xavier Niel was texting the president, he was an introverted teenage hacker who learned to code on a 1-kilobyte computer in his bedroom and who realized there was money to be made from one of most pervasive digital businesses of all: porn.
In 1982, about a decade before the rest of the world got on the World Wide Web and two years before Mark Zuckerberg was born, the French were plugging small plastic monitors up to their telephones and dialing up to a digital economy. By all accounts, they were online before anyone else.
Xavier Niel Bitcoin Code
Less visible has been the 53-year-old entrepreneur’s interest in real estate. He has assembled a portfolio of mansions in spectacular locations such as the Place des Vosges, office buildings near the Seine, and a five-star hotel on the slopes of Courchevel. This side hustle helps explain why Mr. Niel intervened in September when Europe’s biggest shopping mall operator, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, proposed a controversial capital increase after a steep fall in its share price. Mr. Niel believed investors proclaiming the death of retail real estate was wrong and the dilutive share sale was unnecessary.
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This side hustle helps explain why Mr. Niel intervened in September when Europe’s biggest shopping mall operator, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, proposed a controversial capital increase after a steep fall in its share price. Mr. Niel believed investors proclaiming the death of retail real estate was wrong and the dilutive share sale was unnecessary.
He mounted an audacious activist campaign against the company, teaming up with Unibail’s founder Léon Bressler. Unusually for cozy corporate France, they triumphed.
But according to people who know him, something else may also have motivated the man that Bloomberg ranks as France’s ninth-richest, with a fortune worth $7.2bn. The computer hacker who grew up in a working-class Paris suburb never finished college and whose first business success was in sex chat sites still enjoys disruption.
Xavier Niel Iliad
Iliad founder Xavier Niel will finance a €1.4bn buyback of a fifth of the French telecoms group’s share capital, increasing his stake and putting the stock on track for its biggest single-day rise since the company was listed 15 years ago.
Iliad said it planned to repurchase about 11.7m shares on the open market for €120 per share. This represents a premium of 38 percent on the volume-weighted average price over the past three months and a level not seen since January. However, it is a long way off Iliad’s all-time high of €238.70 in June 2014. The shares gained as much as a fifth in morning trading on Tuesday.
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His stake in Iliad could rise from just over 52 percent to as much as 72 percent, depending on the uptake of the share buyback by investors, according to Russell Waller, an analyst at New Street Research. The transaction will be fully financed by a share issue at the same price, representing the same amount as the buyback offer, open to all Iliad shareholders and guaranteed by Mr. Niel, who will not tender his own shares. The repurchased shares will be canceled so Iliad’s total number of shares will remain unchanged.
Xavier Niel Incubateur Station F
Funded with €250m from telecoms entrepreneur Xavier Niel, Station F “put France on the map,” said Oussama Ammar, co-founder of The Family, an accelerator for new companies. “The most important thing is that Xavier Niel showed everyone that France is not scared of doing something bold.” Today, more than 1,000 tech start-ups have taken advantage of Station F’s cheap workspaces, where desks cost from €195 a month.
To mark the anniversary, Station F on Thursday published its top 30 start-ups, including Foodvisor, a food journal, and nutrition app; Daco, a retail analytics company; wilov, a pay-when-you-drive car insurance app; and Mimesys, which builds a hologram teleconferencing software.
Station F said that it chose the top 30 based on several criteria including achieving growth, securing funding, and getting acquired. On Thursday it also announced it will weekly open a co-living space for 600 entrepreneurs, a short walk from Station F.
Xavier Niel 42
42 is a private, nonprofit and tuition-free computer programming school created and funded by French billionaire Xavier Niel (founder of the telecommunication company Iliad) with several partners including Nicolas Sadirac (previous director-general of the Epitech school in France), Kwame Yamgnane, and Florian Bucher (former executives of Epitech). The school was first opened in Paris in 2013.
Out of more than 80,000 candidates in France, 3,000 were selected to complete a four-week intensive computer programming boot camp called piscine (swimming pool). Any person is older than 18. can register for the piscine after completing the logical reasoning tests on the website.
The school does not have any professors and is open 24/7. The training is inspired by new modern ways to teach which include peer-to-peer pedagogy and project-based learning. The School has been endorsed by many high-profile people in Silicon Valley including Evan Spiegel the co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, Keyvon Beykpour the co-founder and CEO of Periscope, Stewart Butterfield the co-founder and CEO of Slack, Brian Chesky the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, Tony Fadell the founder and CEO of Nest Labs, Jack Dorsey the co-Founder and CEO of Twitter, Paul Graham, venture capitalist and co-Founder of Y Combinator, Bill Gurley venture capitalist and general partner at Benchmark.
In addition to the two official campuses in Paris, France, and Fremont, California, the school model was adopted in Lyon, Reims, and Mulhouse, France, as well as in Romania, South Africa, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Moldova, Belgium, Russia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Finland, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates with the help and support of 42.
42 France is located at 96 Boulevard Bessières, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. The building was acquired from the State in 2011 for 12.6 million euros. The building extends over an area of 4242 square meters. Pictures of the school’s architecture are visible on the official website. 42 was designed by the IN&EDIT Architecture agency.
Xavier Niel Investments
At a young age, he started early by developing telecommunication and data services and embarked on an entrepreneurial career soon after his father gave him a Sinclair ZX81 computer as a birthday present. At 19, he successfully created then sold his first company, a French forerunner of the internet service company. This site provided sex-oriented chat services.
In 1995, he invested in the first Internet Service Provider in France, World-NET, created the previous year by Sebastien Socchard, Philippe Langlois, and Pierre Seguret. This company was sold the year before the internet bubble burst.
After taking over a company subsequently renamed Iliad SA, he launched 1996 the 1st reversed directory service on the site. This service was responsible for 1 million euros of revenue per year for the Iliad until the end of the site in France in 2012. He remains Iliad’s majority shareholder, holding 63.93% of the share capital.
In 1999, he created Free, a French Internet service provider. The name came from the fact that modem access was really free, which caused some stir among other (non-free) French Internet providers. In 2002, Free launched a broadband package at a low price ($29.99 per month), which became the benchmark in the market.
In March 2010, he co-founded Jeremie Berrebi Kima Ventures, a fund dedicated to investing in 50 to 100 startups a year everywhere in the world. Kima Ventures already invested in 330 companies from February 2010 to August 2014 in 32 countries.
In 2013, he created 42, a school that trains computer specialists in France and the United States., he opened Station-F, a startup campus located in Paris. He brings significant value to the board due to his extensive experience as an entrepreneur who founded multiple companies, in addition to his leadership and technology experience.
He also owns majority stakes in telecom operators in various countries. Xavier has been involved in the data communications, internet, and telecommunications industry. In 2014, Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) sold its 55% economic interest in Monaco Telecom to NJJ Capital, an investment vehicle controlled by him for US$445 million.
Xavier Niel Philanthropy And Respectability
Xavier Niel surfed a wave of success due to his internet access provider business and married Delphine Arnault, one of the heirs to the LVMH empire. Now accepted into the French business fold, these days he makes headlines because of personal initiatives to help a new generation of innovators.
In March 2013, he established 42, a school dedicated to giving access to computer programming to all by offering high-quality training free of charge regardless of one’s qualifications. In June 2017, Station F – the self-styled largest incubator in the world commenced operations.
More than 170 million dollars have been directly invested in Station F by Niel who has willingly taken on a civic responsibility for the development of French startups. The standard-bearer of innovation remains a key figure in the French tech movement. Niel also owns Le Monde newspaper and is on a first name term with president Macron. This shaper of public behavior is now a shaper of a public opinion, which seems more devoted to him than ever.
Xavier Niel Father Of The Set-Top Box
Xavier Niel took the opportunity to remind everyone of the key to his upstart success against the established players of the telecoms market. Niel was the first to propose the triple-play offer of the internet, television, and telephone. With it, broadband internet became accessible to the masses. His frantic race towards the democratization of technology didn’t stop there: the Free wi-fi network, the Free box with built-in Blu-ray player, Free mobile.
A secret weapon that rivals have still not fully come to terms with Niel understands the battlefield and has boldly crushed the competition with his innovative concepts. Xavier Niel managed in just seventeen years to create a company valued at more than eleven billion dollars.
Xavier Niel Sex Sells Mintels
Aged 20 and studying science, he understood the commercial potential of this forerunner to internet-enabled devices, which was a common sight in French homes thanks to public subsidies. Niel saw dollar signs and decided to drop out of college to get rich quickly. He immersed himself in computer science and began to develop call and chat programs for Mintel’s connected individuals.
Around the same time, he hacked into a phone directory held by the government and the President of the Republic, gaining access to innumerable contacts. But make no mistake about it, it was with the Minitel Rose program, Think Cyber Sex meets Teletext that he made his, and Mintel’s, fortune, as people up and down the country ran up hefty phone bills exchanging steamy messages with one another.
After buying and selling short story service Pon Editions for 800 times what he paid, at the age of 24 Niel was now a millionaire with the means to industrialize his Mintel Rose operation, making thousands of pages of content available to keep users seduced. Niel attracted the wrath of competitors, who denounced his activities, and also his methods, which ignored the unwritten rules of business in France.
After investments in Parisian sex shops and the unauthorized copying of the French telephone directory, the future spearhead of the French economy was in a delicate position in the eyes of the law. In 2004 he was found guilty of receiving stolen company property, although cleared of a second charge of pimping.
Frequently Asked Questions About Xavier Niel
Who is Xavier Niel?
Xavier is a French Billionaire Businessman, Active in the Telecommunications and Technology Industry and best known as the founder and majority shareholder of the French Internet service provider and Mobile operator Iliad trading under the Free brand (France’s second-largest ISP, and third mobile operator). He is also co-owner of the newspaper Le Monde, co-owner of the rights of the song “My Way” and owner of Monaco Telecom, Salt Mobile SA, and Eir.
How old is Xavier Niel?
Xavier is a French National born on 25 August 1967 (age 53 years), Créteil, France.
How tall is Xavier Niel?
Xavier stands at an average height and weight, he appears to be quite tall in his photos, relative to his surroundings, are anything to go by. However, details regarding his actual height and other body measurements are currently not publicly available. We are keeping tabs and will update this information once it is out.
Is Xavier Niel married?
Xavier’s partner or wife is Delphine Arnault, a billionaire in her own right and also the daughter of the richest man in France, Bernard Arnault. He has a daughter with her and two sons from a previous relationship and lives in Paris.
How much is Xavier Niel worth?
Xavier has an estimated net worth of 9.5 billion USD as of 2020. This includes his assets, money, and income. His primary source of income is his career as a Technology entrepreneur. Through his various sources of income, he has been able to accumulate a good fortune but prefers to lead a modest lifestyle.
How much does Xavier Niel make?
Xavier has an estimated net worth of 9.5 billion USD as of 2020. This includes his assets, money, and income. His primary source of income is his career as a Technology entrepreneur. Through his various sources of income, he has been able to accumulate a good fortune but prefers to lead a modest lifestyle.
Where does Xavier Niel live?
Xavier is a resident of Paris, we shall upload pictures of his house as soon as we have them.
Is Xavier Niel dead or alive?
Xavier is alive and in good health. There have been no reports of him being sick or having any health-related issues.
Where is Xavier Niel Now?
Xavier is pursuing his career in journalism. He is working as a businessman, active in the telecommunications and technology industry.
Xavier Niel Contacts
- Instagram- To be updated soon
- Youtube
- Tiktok – To be updated soon
- Website