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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.”
Clever or not, Niel has become far more than a telecom exec. He sits at the center of an issue roiling Europe: how to break free of its technological dependence on the U.S.— just as Trump-era tariffs and schisms over AI regulations strain ties between the transatlantic powers. Niel wants to boost European—and particularly French—tech enough to compete with the U.S. and China as equals. That, he says, requires focusing big investments on AI, but also allowing Europe’s own innovators to partner globally on new technology. What is more, Europe needs to invest in tech hardware and to break its reliance on U.S. cloud computing. “Let’s stop asking our politicians to do everything,” Niel says. “It is for us, normal people, to create companies.”
In this urgent cause, Niel’s maverick status—a divergence from Europe’s rule-bound, risk-averse business establishment—can work in his favor. He embodies the move-fast-and-break-things ethos that Silicon Valley loves, and he’s built relationships with American Big Tech leaders at a time when those CEOs are in constant conflict with European Union regulators.
“I’m not clever at all. It has to be simple, or I cannot understand it. And that really helps.”
Xavier Niel says he believes a lack of intellectual skill has been key to his investment success
What is missing—so far—is a big homegrown tech giant to rival those across the Atlantic. Niel brings some key advantages to the quest. In France, where there is deep suspicion of wealth, Niel has built his business, and his image, partly by skewering the rich, telling consumers when he launched Free that they were being “milked like dairy cows” by other companies. For some, his mystique is boosted by the month he spent in jail in 2004 for alleged pimping and tax evasion; charges were dropped for the former, but the tax charge led to his conviction of concealing the misuse of corporate funds. (“You understand what is real life,” he says of his incarceration.) To techies, moreover, Niel conveys a sense that anyone can make it. “Innovation is about creating a path for non-elites,” says Nicolas Miailhe, cofounder of Paris-based AI company PRISM Eval. “Xavier is one of the few who has done that.”
The Iliad founder also has the ear of President Emmanuel Macron. The French leader came to power in 2017 vowing to transform his country into “a startup nation”; Macron has created a fast-track “tech visa” to lure talent to France, and committed billions in government funds to back entrepreneurs. Today, “if you’re in tech, and you come to France, there are two people you need to meet: Emmanuel Macron and Xavier Niel,” says Philippe Moreau Chevrolet, a communications consultant in Paris. “And at some points, I think [Niel] is more powerful.”
Money is, for now, no problem for Niel. Since 2021, when Niel took Iliad private, he has owned 96% of the company. It generates the bulk of his wealth, even though it isn’t the thing for which many people know him—given that he owns a stake in France’s Le Monde newspaper, co-owns the Paris movie-production company Mediawan, and holds the rights to the pop song “Comme d’habitude” (better known in its English adaptation, “My Way,” made famous by Frank Sinatra).
Niel’s investments now span the globe—with stakes in Uber, Airbnb, and Square, among others. He sits on the board of U.S. private equity firm KKR, and last September he became the only European on the five-person board of TikTok parent ByteDance, giving him a voice in its strategy at a time when it is trying to navigate a U.S. law that will ban the social media platform unless an American company can buy it.
But in business circles, Niel above all else has earned notoriety by creating mainland Europe’s most dynamic tech ecosystem, through the billions he has plowed into venture capital, tech training, and AI research. The motivation: to create Europe’s own tech giants— and fast. “To have more people creating companies, more investors coming from all over the world, it is the thing I want,” he says.
Innovation is about creating a path for non-elites. Xavier is one of the few who has done that.
Nicolas Miailhe, cofounder, PRISM Eval
Last September, Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president, issued a hefty report on Europe’s competitiveness. His findings were bleak, detonating a debate that has raged on in business and political circles for months.
Draghi warned that Europe is headed for disaster as its economy falls further behind the U.S. and China. He said the fragmented, inflexible rules of the 27 EU countries had spurred an exodus of tech talent. About 30% of Europe’s unicorns—startups with billion-dollar valuations—relocated to the U.S. between 2008 and 2021, the report noted. Draghi told EU lawmakers they would need to increase investments in research and innovation by €800 billion a year. Otherwise, he said, “over time, we will inexorably become less prosperous, less equal, less secure, and, as a result, less free to choose our destiny.”
The sobering outlook wasn’t news to Niel, who could have written the report himself. “We don’t have enough ambition,” he tells me. “We don’t have enough startups. ‘Entrepreneur’ is a French word, and maybe we used to have that DNA one century ago. Now, maybe not as much.”
Even so, Niel warns against trying to copy America’s hard-charging work culture or jettisoning Europe’s distinct way of life, which emphasizes generous paid leave and social benefits. “Maybe France, and maybe Europe, is the best location to create a company,” he says. “You have a good life, and if you look for it, you have the best talent.”
Beginning 15 years ago, Niel set out to prove that thesis. In 2010 he launched a venture capital firm, Kima Ventures, which now provides seed funding to more than 120 tech founders annually at a rate of about €15 million a year. While many founders were American in Kima’s early years, it increasingly funds Europeans and proclaims itself the world’s “most active business angel.” In 2013, Niel opened a network of tuition-free coding schools called 42 (a reference to the sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which “42” is the answer to life’s biggest questions), to boost the pipeline of techies who could work for, or become, founders. And in 2017 he launched the world’s biggest tech incubator, a project that has been central to transforming Europe’s startup sector—and in some ways Paris itself.
The enterprise is called Station F, after the decommissioned rail yard on the eastern edge of Paris where it is situated. Niel purchased the 370,000-square-foot site and spent €250 million turning it into a vast complex to house 1,000 startups a year, where founders can get on-site mentorship from Google, Apple, and others. At the time, he was not sure he could fill the space. He need not have worried: About 11,000 startups apply to join Station F each year (founders are expected to move out within two years). The striking industrial halls have drawn onstage appearances from a parade of visiting tech leaders, including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Brian Chesky of Airbnb, and Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital. “For years my friends were coming to Paris to visit the Louvre,” Niel says. “Now they come to visit companies, to invest, to go to Station F.”
Evolution of a Renegade
Niel built his image and success in part by criticizing the business elite; now that he belongs to that elite, he’s sharing some of the wealth.
1980s: Teen Tycoon
Leveraging France’s early Minitel telecom web service, a teenage Niel builds and sells multiple businesses—including X-rated chat rooms.
1999: Telecom Trojan Horse
In his early thirties, Niel starts Iliad Group, whose internet, phone, and mobile services, dubbed Free, now underpin the €10-billion-in-revenue firm.
2010s: Influential Circles
Wider investments broaden Niel’s influence. He joins the board of PE giant KKR; he also becomes the life partner of Delphine Arnault, CEO of Dior.
2010—present: Funding More Xavier Niels
Niel pours money into the startup ecosystem through Kima Ventures, coding schools, and Paris tech incubator Station F.
Today, Niel’s huge emphasis is AI. In 2023 he invested €100 million, through Iliad, to launch Kyutai, a nonprofit, open-source AI lab in Paris, in partnership with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and French shipping exec Rodolphe Saadé, who each also contributed €100 million. And in February, Iliad set aside €3 billion for new AI data centers and open-source AI research in Europe.
Given the dizzying sums involved, it’s striking to see how Niel has pieced together his projects, in a manner depicting an investor who trusts his gut and has limited patience for self-doubting rumination.
One morning, I went to meet Jean de La Rochebrochard, managing partner of Niel’s Kima Ventures, following directions to a building near the Paris opera house. Wandering the corridors, I found no sign of Kima—until de La Rochebrochard popped out of a doorway in jeans and hoodie, explaining that Kima’s three-person staff has no office. Having just landed from New York, he was squatting in a startup’s space, sifting through pitches and taking Zoom meetings, in order to pick that week’s investments for Niel to approve.
De La Rochebrochard plays a crucial role in giving Niel a first look at startups and feeding his considerable appetite for risk—a more American than French characteristic, he points out. Kima now has about 1,450 startups in its portfolio, and has seeded 17 unicorns—though few operate at enormous scale. Prized picks include AI companies like Hugging Face, H, and Poolside, and fintechs TransferWise (now Wise) and Carta. Niel was also an early investor in Mistral AI, Europe’s biggest AI company, which now has a partnership with Free. “I think Xavier’s biggest fear is becoming obsolete,” de La Rochebrochard says. “He looked at his peers, big bosses of French industries, and thought, ‘I don’t want to become like them.’ ”
There is little chance of that, judging by Niel’s eccentric hiring methods alone. De La Rochebrochard says he was hired, in 2015, after emailing Niel cold with an investment idea, and then having one meeting with him. “We clicked, maybe because we share a birthday,” he says, laughing.
Niel also relied on gut instinct after acquiring the Station F site, when he contacted a young American he had met years earlier, while she was writing for TechCrunch. “He emailed me out of the blue,” Roxanne Varza, director of Station F, recalls; she was 29 at the time, working for Microsoft in Paris. Niel asked her to “benchmark different spaces around the world” to inspire Station F’s design.
Raised in Palo Alto, the daughter of Iranian immigrants, Varza flew home and bopped around Silicon Valley, having lunch with friends at tech giants’ hip headquarters and sending ideas back to Niel. Finally, the two reconvened in Paris. “Xavier said, ‘What do you like about this project?’ ” she recalls. “I said, ‘Everything.’ He said, ‘Okay, do everything.’ ” She walked out befuddled. “Was that a job interview? Is that my job now?” she remembers thinking. “The day I started the job, I was like, ‘Is somebody going to tell me what my job is?’ ” No one ever did. But Varza quickly made her name running the place—“the new high priestess of tech,” as one French journalist called her.
In February, Station F hosted a “business day,” featuring hours of fireside chats and presentations, topped off with a late-night rave and a DJ. The event served as the after-party of the AI Action Summit, a gathering of industry titans and world leaders overseen by Macron. Coverage of the summit had been dominated by U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who eviscerated European governments over their tech regulations, telling them in his speech, “The U.S. is the leader in AI, and the administration plans to keep it that way.”
Within hours of Vance’s remarks, thousands of people jammed Station F’s halls. Niel quietly slipped into the building, flanked by police, as he escorted two of his guests: Emmanuel Macron and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The trio huddled backstage, while Varza played emcee to a rotation of big-name speakers, all of them pushing one message onstage: Build Big Tech in Europe.
“Our limit is ambition,” Thomas Wolf, the French cofounder of Hugging Face—the $4.5 billion AI company that was incubated at Station F, before it upped stakes for New York—told the crowd. “We should not think, ‘I am building a French startup.’ You should think, ‘I am building a global company.’ ” French Digital Minister Clara Chappaz implored the audience to boost homegrown AI, and to stay in Europe. “There is no way we can leave this technology in the hands of only a handful of countries,” she said.
That, of course, is exactly what Niel has argued for years. “We have been trying to have more entrepreneurs, more people starting companies,” he says in our interview. “Over time, we will have big successes. To do this thing, I need to be optimistic.”
This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline ‘Hacker, ‘Fraud,’ Billionaire…Europe’s Tech Savior‘ by Vivienne Walt
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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Vivienne Walt
