Not many people get to have lunch with Xavier Niel. “Each week,” explains the French telecoms billionaire, “I try to have three lunches with my children, one working lunch, and one lunch with mates.”
Niel, sometimes described as “the French Steve Jobs”, is worth around €6bn and co-owns newspaper Le Monde. However, the moment he walks into Senderens, a Michelin two-star restaurant in Paris, you spot that he isn’t a card-carrying member of the French elite. A touch overweight, unshaven, tieless, in a rumpled white shirt and with long black hair swept back, he isn’t instantly surrounded by fawning staff. Indeed, throughout our lunch, the waiters will show no sign of ever having seen him before, though he’s been coming here for 20 years.
In insiders’ Paris, Niel is a proud outsider: “un self-made man” (as the French say), from an unlovely Parisian suburb, who started his entrepreneurial career as a teenager in the 1980s with sex chat sites, and who never studied beyond high school. At this low point for France’s international reputation, here comes Niel, whose rise symbolises a different country. He has an outsider’s view of France’s problems – which he thinks he can help solve.