The New Yorker:

Patrick Drahi made a fortune through debt-fuelled telecommunications companies. Now he’s bringing his methods to the art market.

By Sam Knight

When Patrick Drahi, a fifty-five-year-old French Israeli telecommunications billionaire, agreed to buy Sotheby’s, one of the world’s two great auction houses, early in the summer of 2019, people in the art market had two questions: Who is Drahi? And what does he want?

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.

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