A week before the release of a book-interview, the boss of Free was on stage at the Olympia this Wednesday, September 18 for a unique one-man show. In front of 2,500 people, he looked back on his career and gave ironic advice for succeeding in life.
How to become a billionaire. The title of the show that Xavier Niel gave this Wednesday, September 18 on the stage of the Olympia in Paris is like its author: provocative, ironic, parodic, but also full of naivety. But what was the founder of Free, one of the biggest fortunes in France, going to be able to tell in a show lasting an hour and a half?
Rather than a show, it was a master class that the 2,500 spectators attended for one evening, among whom we could meet the boss of vente-privée.com Jacques-Antoine Granjon, the intellectual Jean-Louis Missika, but also the influencer Léna Mahfouf, alias Lena Situations on social networks.
A great masterclass interspersed with video clips, sketches and fake archive images of him at the beginning of his career in the Minitel. From the beginning, Xavier Niel sets the tone. “It’s great to be a billionaire, everyone wants to be your friend. And you don’t have to be a genius. Besides, take the geniuses: Einstein, IQ 162, how many start-ups did he create?”
“I’ve failed ten times more in my life than I’ve succeeded.”
To become a billionaire, the founder of the telecom giant, which has nearly 50 million subscribers worldwide, sees only two options. The first: “Having billionaire parents, but I don’t know how to do that,” jokes the partner of Delphine Arnault, the daughter of the richest French fortune. The second: “becoming an entrepreneur.”
Then follows a series of five pieces of advice with ironic titles that tell the main stages of his adventure: “Go to prison”, “Trust Lena Situations”, “Make a pact with the devil”, “Respect your competitors” and “Believe”, which he will pronounce believe in French.
Each of his lessons is an opportunity to revisit a significant event in his rise. Like his month-long incarceration at La Santé prison in 2004, for example. A traumatic experience, we understand when he talks about it 20 years later.
But he has no bitterness towards Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, who ordered his detention and who died last May at the age of 71. “He gave me this advice: ‘Mr Niel, bite the yellow line, bite it several times if necessary, but never cross it’.”
He will remember from this episode that failures are just hazards to be forgotten very quickly. “I have failed ten times more in my life than I have succeeded,” he confides. “I applied to buy M6 last year and I was a monumental flop. I wanted to buy CGR cinemas and I lost again. Then I wanted to buy the Casino group, again a failure. But each time I forget and move on to something else.”
“I am an incorrigible optimist”
The career of the man whom Nicolas Sarkozy nicknamed “the pornographer” has not exactly been a smooth ride. The self-taught entrepreneur, a bit of an anarchist and deeply anti-establishment, is not really welcome at the big table of French capitalism. Like in the early 2010s, when he wanted to attack mobile phones by slashing prices. Sharp exchanges with other operators, threats, pressure…
“At that time, I had become completely paranoid,” he says. “One day my heart was beating fast. I had lunch with some people from telecommunications one afternoon and in the evening I went to the hospital and told the emergency doctor that I might have been poisoned! A mistake not to make. I was immediately sent to cardiac resuscitation where I had a bad time.”
It is a more political Xavier Niel who then appears. On stage, he advocates diversity, evokes the beginnings of Free where “we were all of different religions and backgrounds”. The billionaire regrets the “masculine and white” uniformity of entrepreneurship in France, deplores the failures of the French social elevator and mocks the “doctoral students in pessimism who always say that this country is finito”.
“I am an incorrigible optimist,” he admits. “I didn’t believe that Russia would invade Ukraine, that the British would vote for Brexit and I was convinced that Covid would last three days. But you don’t always fail to be optimistic.” His success speaks in his favor.
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