Denise Coates Built a £8 Billion Empire and You've Never Heard Her Speak

There is a bar called Queen Elizabeth in Sliema. It sits at the base of a building that houses the Malta offices of Bet365, with a view across the water toward Valletta. I have been there a few times. It is a good bar. Unpretentious, reliable, the kind of place that doesn't try too hard. On a clear evening you can see the bastions from the front.

I have sat in that bar and looked up at the building above me and thought about Denise Coates, who owns it. Not the bar — the company that fills the offices above it. She probably doesn't think about me at all. This seems correct.

Denise Coates is the founder and CEO of Bet365. She is, by most measures, the most successful female entrepreneur in British corporate history. She is worth approximately £8 billion. She is consistently the highest-paid CEO in the United Kingdom — not highest-paid female CEO, highest-paid CEO, full stop, ahead of the men who run the banks and the oil companies and the multinationals that appear on the evening news.

You have almost certainly never heard her speak.

Stoke-on-Trent, 2000

The story begins in the least glamorous location imaginable. Not a garage in California. Not a dorm room at an Ivy League university. A portakabin on a car park in Stoke-on-Trent, in the English Midlands, in the year 2000, when the internet was still dial-up and online gambling was a theoretical concept rather than an industry.

Denise Coates had been working in her father's betting shop business since she was a teenager. Peter Coates — her father — ran a chain of high street bookmakers. She studied econometrics at Sheffield. She came back. She ran the shops. And somewhere in the running of those shops, she noticed something that everyone else in the industry had missed, or noticed and decided was too risky to act on: people were going to want to bet online, and nobody had built the right thing yet.

She borrowed £15 million. Against the betting shops. Against her father's business. Against, in a very real sense, everything. She built a website from that portakabin. She hired developers. She negotiated the technology herself. The Bet365 platform — the one that now processes billions of transactions a year, that runs live in-play betting on every significant sporting event on earth, that serves customers in dozens of countries — she built the architecture of it herself, in the early years, line by line.

This detail matters. She is not a founder who had an idea and hired people to execute it. She understood the technology. She understood the mathematics — she had studied econometrics, which is the discipline of applying statistical models to economic behaviour, which is also, if you think about it, exactly what a betting company does. She was not playing a part. She was doing the work.

What she built

Bet365 is now one of the largest online gambling companies in the world. It operates in markets across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It employs thousands of people. Its Malta office — the one above the Queen Elizabeth bar, with the Valletta view — is one of the hubs of the island's digital economy.

In the year ending March 2024, Bet365 reported revenues of £3.8 billion. Denise Coates's own compensation package for that year was £220 million. Two hundred and twenty million pounds. In a single year. More than the CEOs of Barclays, HSBC, and BP combined.

People find this number uncomfortable. I understand why. It is a very large number and it comes from an industry that has a complicated relationship with harm. Gambling addiction is real. The social costs of problem gambling are real. Any honest account of what Bet365 does has to include that layer, and Denise Coates knows this — Bet365 has invested significantly in responsible gambling tools, in self-exclusion mechanisms, in the infrastructure of harm reduction, though critics would say not enough and they may be right.

But the discomfort with the number is also, sometimes, about something else. It is about a woman from Stoke-on-Trent who borrowed money against her father's business and made herself the highest-paid CEO in Britain, and the fact that this sits uncomfortably with the story we prefer to tell about how success is supposed to happen.

The silence

Denise Coates has never given a media interview. Not one. Not to the Financial Times, not to the BBC, not to anyone who has tried, and many have tried. She does not appear at conferences. She does not have a public profile on social media. She does not give speeches at industry events. She does not, as far as anyone can tell, particularly care what anyone thinks of her.

This is, in the current era, almost impossible to imagine. We live in a time when every founder with a modestly successful company has a personal brand, a podcast appearance, a TED talk in the works. The expectation that success must be performed publicly — that building something is only meaningful if you narrate the building of it — is so pervasive that we have stopped noticing it.

Denise Coates simply doesn't participate. She built an £8 billion company and she will not tell you about it. She sits on the board of Stoke City Football Club, which her father also owns. She gives to charity, substantially and quietly. She goes to work. She is 57 years old and she does not appear to be slowing down.

I find this more admirable than I can quite explain. There is something in the refusal — in the decision to let the work be the thing, rather than the story about the work — that feels almost principled. Almost radical, in the current climate.

On gambling, specifically

I am not against gambling. I want to be clear about this, because any honest writing about Bet365 requires it.

I believe that adults should be able to make their own decisions about risk and money, and that the paternalistic instinct to protect people from their own choices is often more about discomfort than genuine care. I also believe that the gambling industry has, historically, done too little to protect the people who cannot stop, and that this failure is real and serious and should be part of the conversation.

Both of these things are true simultaneously. Denise Coates built a company that provides entertainment to millions of people who bet responsibly and enjoy it. She also built a company that operates in an industry with documented harm. She knows this. The question of how you weigh those things is not simple, and anyone who tells you it is simple is selling you something.

What I will say is this: the responsible gambling tools that Bet365 has built — the deposit limits, the cooling-off periods, the self-exclusion systems — are among the most sophisticated in the industry. Not because the company is virtuous, but because Denise Coates understood, from the beginning, that the long game required the industry to survive, and the industry would only survive if it took harm seriously. Enlightened self-interest, maybe. But also: effective.

The view from Sliema

I live five minutes from the Bet365 offices. I can see the building from certain angles in my neighbourhood. On some evenings, I walk past it on the way to the ferry or down toward the waterfront, and I think about the fact that inside those offices, people are working on systems that process hundreds of millions of pounds of bets every day, for customers who will never know where the servers are or who built the platform or who owns the company.

Denise Coates owns the company. She borrowed £15 million in 2000, in a portakabin, and she built this. The offices above a bar called Queen Elizabeth, with the view of Valletta's bastions across the water, are part of what she built.

She has never told anyone this story herself. She has declined every opportunity to do so.

I think she would be fine with me telling it instead.