Patrick Drahi bought Sotheby's in early summer 2019 after building a telecommunications fortune through debt-fuelled acquisitions. The purchase prompted questions about his motives and strategy in the art market. Drahi had a net worth near eight billion dollars but was not a prominent collector, ranked modestly by art-sales databases. Unlike French luxury magnates with public foundations and household recognition, Drahi maintained a low public profile, dividing his time among Switzerland, Israel, and Nevis. A spokesperson described him as a connoisseur with encyclopaedic musical and pictorial knowledge, yet he remained an elusive presence in the traditional art establishment.
On a superficial level, buying an auction house is the kind of thing that French billionaires do. Christie's, a rival of Sotheby's since the seventeen-sixties, has been owned by François Pinault, a French luxury-goods magnate and prolific art collector, for the past quarter century. A former banker who worked with Drahi described the acquisition to me as an heirloom. "Think about your obituary," he said. "Are you likely to be recalled for having done many cable deals, or having owned Sotheby's?"
But Drahi, who had a net worth of around eight billion dollars, seemed to come out of nowhere. Although a spokesperson described him as a connoisseur with "an encyclopaedic knowledge of classical music and paintings particularly," he wasn't considered a major player in the art market. Artprice, a French art-sales database, reportedly listed Drahi as the two-hundred-and-fifty-second-biggest art collector in the world.
Moreover, unlike Pinault and Bernard Arnault, another French luxury-goods billionaire, who used to own Phillips (an auction house that, like Sotheby's and Christie's, was founded in London in the eighteenth century), Drahi did not seem eager for a public profile. Whereas Pinault and Arnault were household names in France and had major foundations, Drahi was more elusive, dividing his time among Switzerland, Israel, and the Caribbean island of Nevis.
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