, Columnist
A French Billionaire Wants to Disrupt Silicon Valley
The tech entrepreneur Xavier Niel is opening a California campus of his groundbreaking anti-school, 42.
Unlearning.
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The French have something to teach Silicon Valley about tech. At least, Xavier Niel, the iconoclastic billionaire who revolutionized French mobile telephones and once bid unsuccessfully for the U.S. cellular operator T-Mobile, thinks so: He's opening a California campus of the unusual engineering school he started in Paris.
The school is called "42," a nod to the "the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything" in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Niel, who is worth $7.6 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires, set it up the Paris campus in 2013 with a 70 million euro ($79 million), 10-year grant. Another $100 million is earmarked for the U.S. campus in Fremont, which is bigger.