Xavier Niel Dashing French Billionaire

 French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel has had a colorful— and enormously successful—business career

- Justin Rohrlich

In December 2011, the businessman Xavier Niel posted a mysterious message on his Twitter page. “The Rocket is on the launch pad,” it said, cryptically.

Two years passed without another mention. Then, in March 2013, this: “#42 invents a new paradigm for developer education: open admission, no tuition fee, peer-2-peer learning...1000 students/year.”

Niel was unveiling a somewhat radical concept of a coding school, which opened its first location in Paris in 2013. Its name, 42, is a nod to Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the number is the so-called “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” That first year it received 20,000 applications; 19,000 of those people didn’t get in.

The lucky ones went on to three years of training, all completely gratuit. In 2016, 42 opened its second campus in Fremont, California. There are now affiliate branches of 42 in Ukraine, South Africa, and Romania. Niel has said he plans to increase capacity to 10,000 annually in the not too distant future. So far, 42 seems to have been well-received by the broader tech community. “My God is 42 impressive,” computer scientist and Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham recently raved, on Twitter, naturally. “This is not another programming boot camp. It’s another MIT.”