One of the only things that is known about Denise Coates, the extremely discreet boss and founder of Bet365, a British multinational online gambling company, is her salary. But what salary! 220 million pounds (255 million euros) in the 2023 fiscal year alone (April 2022-March 2023), to which must be added at least 50 million pounds in dividends, according to the accounts of his company published on January 7. Or around 310 million euros over a single year. The self-made woman is – by far – one of the highest paid people in the world.
In comparison, the highest paid boss of the CAC 40 – the star index of the Paris Stock Exchange – is Bernard Charlès, of Dassault Systèmes, at 33 million euros. The highest-paid U.S. S&P 500 executive is Stephen Schwarzman, who runs management company Blackstone, with $253 million.
Last year was nothing special for Denise Coates. According to the calculations of Monde, it has paid itself a total of 2.4 billion pounds (2.8 billion euros) in salaries and dividends since 2008. Until the beginning of the 2010s, its remuneration remained in a range between 10 and 20 million per year. It really took off from 2017, peaking in 2020 at more than half a billion euros in a single year.
“A lot of blows to take”
A mystery about this woman who lives near Stoke-on-Trent, one of the poorest cities in England, and who in a quarter of a century created one of the greatest successes of British businesses from scratch. She almost never gives interviews. She just appears in a few promotional videos for her charity, where she doesn’t say anything. Spectators of the Stoke City football team, which Bet365 owns, sometimes see her in the stadium, but the public face of the family is her father, Peter Coates, who is club chairman.
“If you made 200 million a year, you would also be discreet, tries to explain Paul Leyland, online games specialist at Regulus Partners, who met him several times. This is especially true in an industry like betting, where there are a lot of hits to be taken. »
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The story begins in the 1990s. Peter Coates, his father, owns a few bookmakers’ shops, as there are all over the United Kingdom. Denise, the eldest of the siblings, works regularly in these stores, developing an intimate knowledge of the sports betting industry. Numbers are her specialty: she graduated in econometrics from the University of Sheffield.
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