How Bet365 CEO Denise Coates became one of world’s richest women
Denise Coates is one of the UK’s richest women and also the world’s highest-paid executive and highest-earning female CEO. She is the founder and co-CEO of betting firm Bet365.com. She’s been on an impressive streak on last few years, taking in $277 million in salary and an additional $57 million in dividends in 2017, $347 million in 2018, and an incredible $422 million in 2019. Which means Coates has earned more than a billion dollars from her role as CEO of Bet365 in just the last three years.
While Coates was still in school, she started crunching numbers for her dad’s betting shops. She got her Econometrics degree from University of Sheffield.She continued working for her family betting shop,Provincial Racing after college. In 1995, she became Managing Director. She turned the family business around and bought another betting company, became one of the few women at the top of the gambling industry.
Coates had a hunch in the late 1990s that the newly launched internet was a perfect place to set up a gaming company. In 2000, she acquired the Bet365.com domain, spent a year building the website, secured a loan using the family business as collateral, and launched it in 2001. Today, it’s one of the largest online gaming sites in the world and has earned the 52-year-old a net worth of$3.6 billion. She is Bet365.com’s co-CEO (along with her brother John, who is also a billionaire).
Coates is on Tech List’s Top 100 Richest . The UK gambing industry is a lot different from the U.S. The gambling market for the UK makes up 32% of the global gambling industry. The UK is the world’s largest gambling market – there’s just about everything you can actually bet on. The salary of Coates is unbelievable but controversial. Gambling addicts cost the UK as much as $1.5 billion per annum. Authorities believe more regulations are required for the UK gambling industry. This can result in a limitation of the ability of Bet365 to do business and, as a result, decrease the earnings of Coates.
In August 2012, she founded a charity named The Denise Coates Foundation. She has contributed over $128 million to 20 charities in the UK and overseas through the foundation. Besides that, Coates also created 3,000 new jobs in an area of the United Kingdom that had shed jobs significantly in recent decades. In 2012, she was awarded a “Commander of the Order of the British Empire” (CBE) for her services to the business and the community.
Coates spent $6.9 million in 2018, buying up hundreds of acres of farmland near her home. Between 2014 and 2018, she purchased 12 different plots of land in total. It is reported that she is building a home of $113.4 million on a 75,000-square-foot lake, a boathouse, tennis court, garden and stables.
Coates is married and has five children, four of her children were adopted from the same family.
