HACKER, 'FRAUD,' BILLIONAIRE...EUROPE'S TECH SAVIOR?

Maverick investor Xavier Niel is battling to help Europe grow its own tech giants. The continent's economic future may depend on it.

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FRANCE'S MOST INFLUENTIAL tech mogul has a biography that sounds like that of... well, an American tech mogul. ¶ Xavier Niel made his first fortune as a teenager, creating X-rated chat rooms and the country's first reverse directory with the skills he learned on the Apple II clunker he got at 16. He skipped college—what was the point, since he was already getting rich?—then casually hacked into the phone of the then French president to make a point about weak security. Niel founded the telecom Iliad Group in 1999, launching an internet service, and later a mobile phone plan. Undercutting the prices of established French telecoms, he gave the products an irresistible name: Free. Millions signed up. Now, at 57, more than 40 years removed from his porn-adjacent origins, Niel (pronounced “nee-EL”) sports a receding hairline, a slight stoop, and an estimated wealth of more than $11 billion. He also enjoys domestic splendor with his partner, Delphine Arnault, Dior CEO and daughter of Europe's wealthiest man, LVMH chair Bernard Arnault. (The couple have two young children; Niel has two grown children from his former marriage.) Iliad is now a €10-billion-in-revenue fixture in the French tech universe, and Niel's sprawling investments include billions in startups, tech training, and artificial intelligence.

For all that, Niel still revels in casting himself as someone who stumbled sideways into France's elite. Asked the secret to his success, he says with a half wink, “I'm a fraud.” Leaning across a gleaming conference table during a long interview at Iliad’s headquarters in central Paris, the sun streaming in from the garden, Niel says he believes a lack of intellectual skill has been key to his investment success. “I’m not clever at all,” he says. “It has to be simple, or I cannot understand it. And that really helps.”