Xavier Niel and the media is a long story: star of the internet and French and European telecoms, also active in the press, music and audiovisual production, the businessman now hopes to own his TV.
The founder of the operator Free has been a shareholder since 2010 in the Le Monde group, which includes the daily Le Monde, Télérama, La Vie, Le Monde diplomatique, Courrier international and HuffPost.
Via his holding company NJJ, the billionaire, who cultivates an image of business troublemaker, has developed his own media portfolio, alternating personal investments (L’Obs, Nice-Matin, France-Antilles, Paris-Turf) and minority stakes (The Days, Mediapart).
He is also the sole investor in the new online investigative economic media “L’Informé”, launched in the fall of 2022.
In April 2021, he announced that he wanted to make his shares in the Le Monde and L’Obs group non-transferable, passing them on to an endowment fund to which he intends to contribute his other majority stakes in French newspapers in the long term.
He also co-founded Mediawan in 2015 with his close business partners, Pierre-Antoine Capton and Matthieu Pigasse.
This group, behind the successes of the film “Bac Nord” and the series “Dix pour cent”, is present in the production, distribution and broadcasting of films, series and TV shows (“C à vous”, “C in the air” in particular). It employs 1,500 people, for a turnover of around one billion euros.
Mediawan, which counts among its main shareholders the powerful American investment fund KKR, took control in December of the production company Plan B Entertainment, co-founded and chaired by Brad Pitt.
Television, however, remains a blind spot for Xavier Niel, who in 2014 showed his ambitions in the sector, declaring himself ready to take over LCI, whose future was in the balance within the TF1 group.
The businessman then tried to buy RTL’s stake in the M6 group twice, in May 2021 and then in October 2022 following the failure of the merger project between TF1 and M6.
Last time, Mr. Niel made an offer in tandem with the Berlusconi family (MediaForEurope group). The owner of M6, the German media giant Bertelsmann, had finally chosen not to sell.
