One of the only known facts about Denise Coates, the extremely discreet boss and founder of Bet365, a British online gambling multinational, is her salary. And what a salary it is! £220 million (€255 million) for fiscal year 2023 alone (April 2022-March 2023), plus at least £50 million in dividends, according to her company’s accounts published on January 7. That amounts to around €310 million for a single year. The self-made woman is – by far – one of the best-paid people in the world.
By comparison, the highest-paid CAC 40 boss – the flagship index of the Paris stock exchange – is Bernard Charlès of Dassault Systèmes, at €33 million. The highest-paid American S&P 500 executive is Stephen Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone management company, at $253 million.
Last year was not exceptional for Coates. According to Le Monde‘s calculations, she has paid herself a total of £2.4 billion (€2.8 billion) in salaries and dividends since 2008. Up until the early 2010s, her remuneration ranged between £10 and £20 million a year. It really took off from 2017 onwards, peaking at over half a billion pounds in a single year in 2020.
‘A lot of moves to be made’
The woman who lives near Stoke-on-Trent, one of England’s poorest towns, is a mystery. In the space of a quarter of a century, she has created one of Britain’s most successful businesses from scratch. She hardly ever gives interviews. She barely appears in a few promotional videos for her charity, in which she says nothing. Fans of Stoke City soccer team, which Bet365 owns, sometimes see her in the stadium, but the public face of the family is her father, Peter Coates, who is chairman of the club.
“If you made £200 million a year, you’d be equally discreet,” said Paul Leyland, online gaming specialist at Regulus Partners, who has met her on several occasions. “This is particularly true in an industry like betting, where there are a lot of moves to be made.”
The story began in the 1990s. Peter Coates, her father, owned a few betting shops, as they exist all over the UK. Denise, the eldest of the siblings, worked regularly in those shops, developing an intimate knowledge of the sports betting business. Numbers are her specialty: She has a degree in econometrics from Sheffield University.
She soon realized that the internet would revolutionize the world of gambling. She bought the Bet365 brand on eBay for $25,000. “I felt that as a chain of betting shops, we would only ever be a regional player, while with the online business, I felt we could become a leading global player,” she told the Financial Times in 2015, in a very rare interview.
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