UNDER THE HAMMER

Can Sotheby's survive its billionaire owner?

- SAM KNIGHT

When Patrick Drahi, a fifty-five-year-old French Israeli telecommunications billionaire, agreed to buy Sotheby’s, one of the world’s two great auction houses, early in the summer of 2019, people in the art market had two questions: Who is Drahi? And what does he want?

On a superficial level, buying an auction house is the kind of thing that French billionaires do. Christie’s, a rival of Sotheby’s since the seventeen-sixties, has been owned by François Pinault, a French luxury-goods magnate and prolific art collector, for the past quarter century. A former banker who worked with Drahi described the acquisition to me as an heirloom. “Think about your obituary,” he said. “Are you likely to be recalled for having done many cable deals, or having owned Sotheby's?”

But Drahi, who had a net worth of around eight billion dollars, seemed to come out of nowhere. Although a spokesperson described him as a connoisseur with “an encyclopaedic knowledge of classical music and paintings particularly,” he wasn't considered a major player in the art market. Artprice, a French art-sales database, reportedly listed Drahi as the two-hundred-and-fifty-second-biggest art collector in the world.

Moreover, unlike Pinault and Bernard Arnault, another French luxury-goods billionaire, who used to own Phillips (an auction house that, like Sotheby's and Christie's, was founded in London in the eighteenth century), Drahi did not seem eager for a public profile. Whereas Pinault and Arnault were household names in France and had major foundations, Drahi was more elusive, dividing his time among Switzerland, Israel, and the Caribbean island of Nevis. “He is not in Paris. He is not in New York. He is not in London,” a person close to Drahi said. “He is not where his counterparts are. He is not spending a single minute in any cocktail or public event.”