Denise Coates, Britain’s richest woman and heir to the Bet365 betting empire, has scooped her latest nine-figure payday despite a 41% salary cut, helping her continue to outpace big-name CEOs across the Atlantic Ocean.
Bet365’s highest-paid director, who is believed to be its joint-CEO, Coates, scooped a total of £158.7 million in compensation last year, according to Companies House documents, representing a steep drop from her 2023 income of £270 million between salary and dividends.
In the year to March 2024, Coates is believed to have received a salary of £94.7 million. In addition, her 58% shareholding in Bet365 helped her rake in an extra £64 million in dividends last year. Her brother and co-CEO, John Coates, also shared in the £110 million dividend.
Bet365, through both its sports and gaming division and its ownership of Championship football club Stoke City, increased its pretax profits to £596 million last year, while revenue rose 9% to £3.7 billion.
Coates, whose family is worth nearly £8 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, has long been one of Britain’s best-paid executives. She made waves in 2020 when she received an eye-popping, record-breaking £466 million in compensation as revenues soared during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was followed by a £300 million payday in 2021.
Britain’s richest businesswoman has been rewarded for a bet of her own in 2000 when she mortgaged her father’s betting shops to set up an online business with her brother.
While her compensation last year was a steep reduction from previous big paydays, it continues to outpace the income of CEOs of several of the world’s most valuable companies. Apple CEO Tim Cook, for example, took home a total of $63.2 million (£50.4 million) in 2023, a third of Coates’s total compensation last year.
Jensen Huang, meanwhile, who as CEO of Nvidia oversaw a remarkable rise in market value for the chipmaker, took home a comparably small $34.2 million (£27.3 million) in the 2024 fiscal year. Both Huang and Cook hold shares in their respective companies that aren’t as easily vested as those of Coates’s in her private, family-owned company.
Bet365 scrutiny grows
Coates’s repeated nine-figure paydays come amid increasing scrutiny of Bet365 and the wider gambling industry.
In April last year, Bet365 was ordered to pay £582,000 in fines after the Gambling Commission found it broke anti-money-laundering rules and failed to protect vulnerable customers.
The Labour government, whose leader Keir Starmer received financial backing from John Coates during his 2020 leadership campaign, is rolling out new regulations to address the harmful societal effects of gambling addiction. This will include monetary limits for spins on online slot machines.
Coates’s eye-watering annual compensation has also caught the attention of campaign groups, who are disappointed at her payout amid a cost-of-living crisis.
The High Pay Centre, a think tank, was highly critical of Coates’s £270 million payday for 2023.
“Nobody becomes a multimillionaire in isolation from wider society,” the group wrote last year.
“In this case, the wealth depends on money coming out of gamblers’ pockets, the efforts of thousands of staff, plus wider factors like people having some disposable income, a secure and reliable internet network or all the infrastructure that goes into staging sports events.”
The group added: “There really is no moral or economic justification for such extreme payouts and the inequality and division that they create.”
