Capital Economy, Business and Finance
The French billionaire Rodolphe Saadé is buying France’s most watched TV channel, BFM TV, in a €1.6 billion deal to take over Altice Media. The deal cements Saadé’s status as head of a media empire which has taken him all of three years to build. His shipping company earned €45 billion in profits from 2020 to 2023, allowing him to acquire two large papers, La Tribune and La Provence, in the same period. Altice Media owns radio as well as TV outlets and BFM TV broadcasts news 24 hours a day. Saadé joins a small group of French billionaires owning large media groups, among them Bernard Arnault of LVMH, the Dassault family and the telecoms mogul Xavier Niel. For a country with the second-highest tax burden in the OECD, France is proving a fertile breeding ground for billionaires with sufficient surplus cash to reshape the media landscape on a whim.