Xavier Niel: The long-haired bad boy of French business

After a hard day's work, Xavier Niel "likes nothing better than to find a dark corner of a poorly lit street and disappear down a manhole", says Wired.

The man credited with liberating France's internet and mobile-phone markets is one of a secretive fraternity of 'cataphiles' he's been exploring and partying in Paris's network of catacombs, amid "the bones of its dead", since he was a teenager.

"I go down once or twice a week," he says. "Down there I feel normal again It's my reference."

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Quite what the denizens of middle America would make of this or indeed Niel's background as the owner of a sex chat service is anyone's guess. But they could be hearing a lot more from "the long-haired bad boy of French telecoms", says the Financial Times.

Last month, his outfit, Iliad, tabled a $15bn cash bid to take control of T-Mobile US, a company five times its size and America's fourth-largest provider. The move was rebuffed by T-Mobile's parent Deutsche Telekom. But Niel has made it clear that he won't give up the pursuit (see below).

Though little known outside France, Niel "has been hard to ignore in that nation's generally button-down business world", says Bloomberg. A self-made billionaire (worth $9.4bn, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires index), he shot into the French mobile market in 2012, when Iliad-subsidiary Free pioneered "triple-play" packages combining TV, broadband and landline, promising "to cut prices by half".

There followed a bitter two-year tariff war with the incumbent operators: Orange, Vivendi and Bouygues. Many traditionalists were equally outraged when Niel led an investment group that took control of the venerable Le Monde newspaper in 2010.

"We saved Le Monde! I adore this phrase," Niel, 46, told the FT last year. He repeats it in English: "We saved ze World!" One reason for his glee, says the paper, is that in "insiders' Paris" he is a "proud outsider" out to challenge what he perceives as the entrenched "cronyism" of the French business elite."France didn't obstruct me, but it didn't help me either," is how he describes his rise.

Born in the "unlovely" Parisian suburb of Creteil, he never studied beyond high school but made use of his talent as a teenage programmer to start up businesses on Minitel, the now-defunct French precursor to the internet.

Niel headed where the money was (sex chat sites), later founding France's first internet service provider, Worldnet. The only hiccough came in 2004 when he was briefly jailed after a four-year judicial investigation into one of his businesses.

Niel is proud of his programming origins, something he shares with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, though he insists that, "as a little French entrepreneur", he is much less brilliant than they are. "I once said, Steve Jobs is the American Xavier Niel'... but that was humour."

Why the French are always complaining

The game changer was when the SoftBank chief, Masayoshi Son, bought US telecom Sprint for $21bn, then made noises about buying T-Mobile US to create "the world's number-one company". For Niel, it was a "now or never moment". He seized his chance this summer after Sprint walked away from the deal.

Whether or not he lands T-Mobile may come down to the price, says Ruth Bender in The Wall Street Journal. Deutsche Telekom seems keen to get shot of it, but has dismissed Iliad's $33 a share offer as "inadequate".

The US market is certainly "ripe for the type of disruption" that Niel has made his forte, say Matthew Campbell and Cornelius Rahn on Bloomberg.

Recent figures show that 50MB of mobile data costs an average of $85 in America, compared to $34.60 in France.

Americans will certainly like Niel's prices. They may also warm to his brand of "egalitarian capitalism", says Fiachra Gibbons on Wired. "The social elevator no longer works. It's broken," says Niel. But he's convinced that technology and entrepreneurial culture can remedy this, "and that it's up to people like him to make sure it does".

One way is to slash prices; another, to invest. To that end, he has established a free technology school in Paris called 42 the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything" in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."The name's funny, but we're serious."

Niel is also a prolific angel investor, who claims to invest in two start-ups a week because "it's more profitable than playing the lottery and much more fun", he tells Simon Kuper in the FT.

A rare "happy Parisian", he has no truck with the general despair dogging France. "That's the malaise: they're always complaining." The French do it on principle, he outlines. "They were authorised to in 1789 and they decided to continue."