Denise Coates, the billionaire boss of British gambling company Bet365, is frequently regarded as one of the wealthiest women in the UK. In 2020, her annual salary peaked at £421million and over the last five years her earnings have comfortably surpassed the £1billion mark.
With humble beginnings in the year 2000, Denise founded the Stoke-on-Trent company with only 12 employees. Now, with over a 100million customers, Bet365 has grown to a staggering 9,000 plus employees across their global offices. According to recently filed accounts with Companies House, the billionaire co-CEO of the online betting firm received a remuneration of £94.6million for the year ending 31 March 2024.
This figure happens to be significantly lower than the £220.6m Denise took home the previous year. At 57, with her 58% shareholding in Bet365, Denise is also set to receive a portion of the £110million dividend distributed by the group, alongside her brother, the joint CEO of Bet365.
Facing a 41% salary reduction, Denise experienced a cut of nearly £130million, even as the betting giant returned to profitability with a nearly £600million profit.
With a first-class degree in econometrics after which she trained as an accountant within the company firm, Denise has previously earned the title of one of the UK’s ‘most successful women’ and has made her indelible mark as one one of the best-paid executives in the world.
With a combined net worth of around £7.5billion, the Coates family sat pretty in the 20th spot on last year’s Sunday Times Rich List.
Denise has been widely credited with the meteoric rise of Bet365. The gambling firm offers online sports such as betting, casino games, poker, and bingo to millions of users worldwide.
According to her brother, John Coates, Denise became obsessed with the potential that lay in online gambling 25 years ago, while she was working in their father’s family-run chain of local betting shops.
After convincing her family to mortgage the business, Denise then used the funds to develop new software for Bet365 and set up the firm’s headquarters in the car park of a temporary building. The Stoke-on-Trent native has pioneered the growth of the online gambling industry and been a major force behind the shift from physical to online betting.
In a testament to her company’s mammoth progress, Bet365 is now the largest private-sector employer in the Stoke area and is regarded as one of the world’s biggest online gambling websites.
Denise grabbed everyone’s attention in 2020 with a jaw-dropping, eye-popping £466million in compensation as the company’s revenues skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, in 2021, she scored another massive £300million payday.
Although her compensation last year displayed a significant drop from her previous gargantuan paydays, Denis’s salary continues to outpace those earned by top CEOs of many of the world’s most valuable companies.
Tim Cook, Apple’s famed CEO, took home $63.2million (£50.4million) in 2023, which was only a third of Denise’ robust compensation that same year.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who steered the chipmaker to a remarkable surge in market value, earned a relatively modest $34.2million (£27.3million) in the 2024 fiscal year. Unlike Denise, whose shares in her privately-owned family business are more easily vested, both Huang and Apple’s Tim Cook hold shares in their companies with more complex vesting conditions.
Last year in April, Bet365 was ordered to pay a hefty fine of £582,000, following the Gambling Commission’s findings of the online betting company having breached anti-money-laundering rules and failing to protect vulnerable customers.
Denise’s eye-watering annual compensation also caught the eye of campaign groups, with several of them expressing their disappointment at her colossal payout amid what can be described as one of the UK’s most severe cost-of-living crises in recent years.