Posted on: January 7, 2025, 08:49h.
Last updated on: January 7, 2025, 09:02h.
Britain’s best-paid woman, Bet365 CEO Denise Coates, cut her pay by almost half last year. But the billionaire businesswoman still took home £150 million (US$188 million) in salary and dividends, according to the company’s latest accounts.
The pay drop comes despite soaring profits for the online betting giant. Bet365’s revenues increased from £3.4 billion (US$4.2 billion) to £3.7 billion (US$4.7 billion) year over year. That led to a pretax profit of £596.3 million (US$ 748 million) in 2014, compared to a £72.6 million (US$91 million) loss the year before, which was largely attributed to the high cost of US expansion.
Despite the 2023 loss, Coates still found room to pay herself £270 million (US$339 million), although this was way short of the £421 million (US$528 million) she claimed in 2020.
Record-Breaking Wages
That year, she became the most generously compensated person in British corporate history, earning around £237,348 ($328,276) per hour based on an average working week of 38 hours.
It is possible she was also the highest-paid executive in the world in 2020, a year when Jeff Bezos, then the world’s richest man, paid himself a modest $80K.
Elon Musk also had a claim that year, but his salary with Telsa was then based on a confusing performance-based rewards plan that mainly involved stock options, which means he either earned $700 million or nothing, depending on how you look at it.
Coates’ latest payday has brought her total compensation from Bet365 to around £2.5 billion (US$3.1 billion) over the past 15 years. Her detractors say this is an obscene amount of money and more than anyone could ever spend in their lifetime.
Others note that Coates has never sought to relocate Bet365 offshore, as have many of her competitors in the online gambling industry.
As such, the company is one of the biggest corporate contributors to UK tax coffers and the biggest employer in the town of Stoke-on-Trent, England, which the Coates family calls home.
As a 51% shareholder in the company, Coates could pay less tax by taking the majority of her pay in dividends, but she chooses not to.
The group also donated £120 million (US$150 million) to the Denise Coates Foundation, a charity committed to health and welfare, community development, medical research and development, education, training, arts, culture, and disaster recovery.
Humble Beginnings
Coates founded Bet365 with her brother, John, in a portable building in Stoke almost 20 years ago, transforming a chain of betting shops owned by her father, Peter, into one of the biggest online gambling companies in the world.
The Coates family came 20th in The Times of London’s list of wealthiest Brits, with a combined net worth of nearly £7.5 billion (US$9.4 billion).
