One of the only things 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 financial year alone (April 2022 – March 2023), plus at least 50 million pounds in dividends, according to his company's financial statements published on January 7th. Or around 310 million euros in a single year. The self-made woman is by far one of the highest paid people in the world.
In comparison, Bernard Charlès of Dassault Systèmes is the highest-paid boss of the CAC 40 – the star index of the Paris Stock Exchange – with 33 million euros. The highest-paid US S&P 500 manager is Stephen Schwarzman, who runs the management company Blackstone, at $253 million.
Last year was nothing special for Denise Coates. According to calculations by Le Monde, it has paid out a total of 2.4 billion pounds (2.8 billion euros) in salaries and dividends since 2008. Until the early 2010s, her compensation ranged between 10 and 20 million per year. Things really took off in 2017 and peaked in 2020 with more than half a billion euros in a single year.
“Taking a lot of hits”
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 has created one of the greatest successes of British business from nothing. She almost never gives interviews. She only appears in a few promotional videos for her charity in which she says nothing. Spectators of the Stoke City football team, of which Bet365 is a part, sometimes see them at the stadium, but the public face of the family is their father, Peter Coates, who is the club chairman.
“If you reached 200 million a year, you would also be discreet,” tries to explain Paul Leyland, online gaming specialist at Regulus Partners, who met him several times. This is especially true in an industry like betting, which has seen a lot of losses. »
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The story begins in the 1990s. Peter Coates, his father, owns a number of bookmaking shops like those found across the UK. Denise, the eldest of the siblings, works regularly in these shops and develops a deep knowledge of the sports betting industry. Numbers are her specialty: she completed her degree in econometrics at the University of Sheffield.
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