When he arrives on stage, wearing a white shirt, no tie, a slight smile on his face, Xavier Niel is greeted by applause and shouts. A real rock star. The scene takes place a decade before Niel’s show on September 18, 2024 at the Olympia, but his presentation is already more of a show than a press conference. To announce the launch of Free Mobile in 2012, the boss pulled out all the stops. A video lambasts the operator’s competitors: Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom. Xavier Niel, alone on stage, is hailed as a hero. He promised to revolutionize mobile telephony. The historic operators know that he is about to slash prices. The question is: by how much?
The newcomer strikes a first blow with packages at 19.99 euros, half the price of those of the competition. The audience cheers him. Then, as he pretends to conclude and leave, he returns to the center with his last surprise, his “one more thing” à la Steve Jobs. The boss of Free then announces the launch of a package at 2 euros. And asks the spectators to look under their seats… Where an envelope containing a coin of this amount is hidden. “Give the package to a loved one”, Niel rejoices. The crowd goes wild. The historical operators, flabbergasted.
This press conference made Xavier Niel a legend. And cemented his aura among Free fans, who already constituted a dynamic community on the Internet. Even today, at the slightest announcement, hundreds of thousands of “Freenauts”, as they call themselves, rush to follow the lives and read articles about the company. Freemania has spawned dedicated user associations. Numerous websites. And even fan-organized events.
How can we explain such a craze for Internet boxes, a product that is not very glamorous if ever there was one? We have to go back to 2002 to understand it, when Xavier Niel unveiled the Freebox. “It is the first time in the world that an offer includes ADSL, telephony, but also TV, recalls Renaud Kayanakis, expert telecoms consultant at Sia Partners. He is the one who invented the concept.”
At the origins of Free, the “geek” culture
This offer attracts the attention of technophiles. With each enrichment, such as the addition of Bluetooth, fans grow in number. They also appreciate the fact that the Freebox operating system, based on Linux, is open source. This philosophy of open innovation is particularly popular on the Internet in the early 2000s.
The first forums, where advice and guides are shared, were created shortly after. “I like tinkering and anything related to innovation,” confirms Isabelle, who joined these forums from the start. This lawyer by profession, who immersed herself particularly in these issues during a period of convalescence, found on these sites a “real group of friends”, with whom she continues to exchange today.
This community spirit is also linked to a second particularity of the Freeboxes. Their integrated hard drives allow you to store files and play them using VLC, a multimedia player embedded in the device. However, at the time, illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) downloads were booming. Geeks who indulged in them could therefore watch pirated films and series directly on their TV, thanks to this box. “Free targeted the geek community very precisely, because they knew that they didn’t like monopolies, and that they wanted to download. Niel’s personality helped a lot, because he’s a geek himself,” analyzes the journalist Emmanuel Paquette, who co-wrote the book with Solveig Godeluck Xavier Niel, The Way of the Pirate (First editions, 2016).
Free also stood out very early on with its ads featuring a certain “Rodolphe”. Tall, thin, bearded, wearing old-fashioned glasses and terribly ugly clothes, Rodolphe was supposed to embody this geek – and therefore Free subscribers. Far from feeling insulted, Freenauts loved the character and wanted more. Finally, it was hard to forget the role that pornography played in Free’s success. The boxes were the first to broadcast adult channels in the Freebox TV packages. “They were also the first to sign with big names in porn to broadcast content on demand”, underlines Emmanuel Paquette.
Xavier Niel and the “Freenauts”
But before the Freebox offers, there is a character: Xavier Niel himself. “There is no boss in France who has personified his company to this extent, apart from Alain Afflelou”, points out Renaud Kayanakis. The brash side of this newcomer is attractive. In the media, the boss of Free is described as a “troublemaker”, a “provocateur”.
He has a sense of storytelling, according to Marion Darrieutort, influence specialist and founder of The Arcane, a management consultancy firm who points out, amused: “He does exactly the opposite of what we recommend to our clients. He has a taste for clashes. He is very impulsive in his tweets, whereas usually managers are rather polite, and don’t want to alienate anyone.” On X (ex-Twitter), the boss of Free is having a field day: he parodies Emmanuel Macron’s statements during the Covid crisis, openly mocks conspiracy theories about 5G, mocks his competitors, responds to Internet users who challenge him, defends Free, and makes dirty jokes. And it pays off: 270,000 people follow him on the social network where his jokes are massively reshared.
The billionaire also cultivates a real closeness with the “Freenauts”. Each year, his company organizes a special day for these fans who host sites and forums dedicated to its products. They sometimes receive information in advance and chat with the company’s directors. Isabelle praises the joviality of Nicolas Thomas, the CEO of Free, who regularly pops by. Always in jeans and a white t-shirt, Xavier Niel is present at each of these editions and spends long moments chatting with the fans. “We take photos with him. He even recorded a video to encourage my football team”, confides Isabelle.
In 2024, Xavier Niel has not calmed down. His entry into the board of directors of TikTok, the call he received from Telegram founder Pavel Dourov after his arrest… Niel’s adventures always cause surprise. “How to become a billionaire”, the show he is holding this September 18 at the Olympia was announced on X with great jokes. And the book he is publishing on September 25 promises to be just as provocative. Its title? A real desire to cause trouble.
This subversive image is nevertheless very controlled. In 2008, Xavier Niel, for example, filed a complaint for defamation against the former editorial director of Releasefor a comment left by an Internet user. Four years later, it is a journalist from Echoes who had been indicted following another defamation complaint, targeting comments by Didier Casas, general secretary of Bouygues Telecom, reported in the article. By taking the microphone this evening in front of a friendly crowd of Freenauts, Xavier Niel exposes himself, without taking big risks. A strategy that works for him: in 2023, according to a survey conducted by Forbeshe was still one of the French people’s favorite entrepreneurs.
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