Background and career
Xavier Niel (French pronunciation: [gzavje njɛl]; born 25 August 1967) is a French billionaire entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder and majority shareholder of the telecommunications group Iliad and the largest shareholder of Vodafone Group and Westfield Group and a co-owner of the newspaper Le Monde. Niel also serves as chairman of Iliad, and sits on the board of KKR and ByteDance. As of July 2026, his net worth is estimated at €30.1 billion by Challenges and at US$16 billion by Forbes.
Xavier Niel was born into a middle-class family in the Val-de-Marne department, southeast of Paris. His family lived in Créteil, in the Mont-Mesly neighborhood. His father worked as a legal advisor for a pharmaceutical company, and his mother was an accountant. Mont-Mesly is a large postwar public housing development built from the late 1950s on a hill in western Créteil. It consists of several hundred HLM (habitation à loyer modéré, or subsidized public housing) buildings and is now designated as a quartier prioritaire de la politique de la ville, the French government's classification for disadvantaged urban neighborhoods targeted for public investment. In his 2024 memoir, Niel described the area during his childhood as a neighborhood undergoing rapid change, with thousands of people arriving from across France and abroad over a short period. He recalled an environment marked by genuine social diversity and integration that generally worked, although not without tensions. He also described classmates bringing firearms to school, taken from their homes and shown to friends during breaks, as well as knife fights among teenagers. After he returned home covered in blood following a fight, his parents transferred him to a private Catholic school. Niel attended Allezard Elementary School and Louis Pasteur Middle School in Créteil before transferring to Collège Maillé and later Lycée Saint-Michel-de-Picpus, a private Catholic school in Paris that attracted students from a wide range of religious and social backgrounds. He has described himself as an average student who was, in his own words, "bad at nothing and good at nothing." After graduating from high school, he briefly attended college before dropping out in 1987. When he was 14, his father gave him a Sinclair ZX81 home computer, a British machine that sold for about 700 French francs at the time. Niel has described the gift as the turning point in his career. Every week, his father would stop at a neighborhood coffeehouse and bring home a copy of Hebdogiciel, a weekly computer newspaper that published programs readers could type into their own computers. Niel taught himself programming by copying those listings into his ZX81. At a time when relatively few people in France knew how to write software, he soon began earning money by developing server software for companies, including newspaper publishers. While still in high school, he spent his evenings, weekends, and, by his own account, many nights writing software before returning to class the next morning, earning his first income as a programmer.
In 1987, after dropping out of college at the age of 19, Niel founded his first company, which operated services on Minitel, the French videotex network that predated the World Wide Web. The company specialized in adult chat services. To operate legally, Niel acquired publishing licenses, a regulatory framework originally intended for newspapers and magazines, and used them to become a registered Minitel service provider. He has said that the business made him a millionaire, in today's euros and dollars, by the age of 24. During the same period, Niel and businessman Fernand Develter invested in a number of Paris-based peep-show establishments. Some of these businesses later became the subject of criminal investigations, and certain managers were convicted on charges related to procuring. According to press reports, the investigations concerned activities involving direct physical contact between clients and sex workers. These proceedings did not target Niel personally, although his investments in the sector attracted media attention.
As a teenager, Niel hacked Canal+ television decoders. After being identified by police, he was summoned to the French Ministry of the Interior rather than prosecuted. According to the investigative biography Xavier Niel: La voie du pirate, officers from the Direction de la surveillance du territoire, France's domestic intelligence agency at the time, offered him a choice between criminal prosecution and cooperation. He chose the latter and spent several months working with the agency, helping monitor Soviet activity on French telecommunications networks. During the same period, Niel gained access to the Radiocom 2000 mobile telephone network, then used by French government officials, and obtained the phone numbers assigned to 84 official vehicles, including one used by President François Mitterrand. Le Monde reported the incident at the time, identifying the hacker only as a 20-year-old computer specialist. Niel later confirmed publicly that he was responsible.
After his early activities in the Minitel sector, Xavier Niel became involved in the emerging internet industry. In 1995, he invested in Worldnet, one of France’s first consumer internet service providers. The company was sold in 2000 for approximately €40 million, shortly before the collapse of the dot-com bubble. In 1999, Niel founded the telecommunications group Iliad and launched Free, an internet service provider. In 2002, Free introduced a broadband offer priced at €29.99 per month and launched the Freebox, combining internet access, television and telephone services in a single package. In 2012, Iliad entered the French mobile market with the launch of Free Mobile. Its flagship plan, which included unlimited calls, unlimited text messages and mobile data for €19.99 per month, was priced significantly below comparable offers from the three incumbent operators. The launch intensified competition in the French mobile market and was followed by substantial price reductions across the sector. From the late 2010s onwards, Niel expanded his telecommunications interests outside France. In 2018, Iliad Italia launched operations in Italy with a mobile plan priced at €5.99 per month. In 2020, the group acquired the Polish operator Play, one of the country’s largest mobile operators. Through his investment vehicle NJJ, Niel also acquired or invested in telecommunications operators in Monaco (Monaco Telecom), Switzerland (Salt), Ireland (eir), Cyprus (Epic Cyprus), Malta (Epic Malta) and Ukraine (Lifecell). In 2023, NJJ became the largest shareholder of Millicom (42% stake), a telecommunications group operating on 12 markets in Latin America. Niel subsequently made two unsuccessful attempts to acquire the company outright. In 2026, Xavier Niel became Vodafone’s largest shareholder after acquiring Etisalat’s 16.2% stake for approximately $6 billion through his family investment vehicle Vega.
Since 2020, Niel has been acquiring shares in the real estate company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, as of 2024 he was owning 25% of the shares of the company. Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has an international presence in Europe (France, Spain, UK, Germany) and in the United States in California (Westfield Topanga, Westfield Century City).
