From The Sunday Times
September 2, 2007
Palace boss lives like a king
Football club chairman Simon Jordan seems to have it all – the cars, the yacht and the villa in the sun.
SIMON JORDAN, 39, is the former mobile-phone tycoon turned chairman and owner of Crystal Palace Football Club.
He made his fortune from the Pocket Phone Shop, which he set up with Andrew Briggs in 1994. The business flourished by undercutting rivals and selling phones for as little as 99p. It was sold to One-2-One, now known as T-Mobile, for £73m in 2000.
At the age of 32, Jordan used the proceeds to buy Crystal Palace, which was in danger of being taken into administration because of financial troubles. He has supported the club since his childhood – not least because his father played for the team in the 1950s.
Earlier this year he appeared in ITV’s Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway alongside Jacqueline Gold, the managing director of Ann Summers, and the former Conservative MP and novelist Jeffrey Archer.
Jordan is financing a British film about music producer Joe Meek entitled “Telstar”, featuring Kevin Spacey and Ralph Little.
Jordan, whose girlfriend is the former model Suzi Walker, lives in Marbella, although he regularly flies back to Britain.
How much money do you have in your wallet?
I have £800 on me at the moment, which is actually a little less than I would carry normally. Usually I have a couple of thousand.
I carry the money because I’m a huge tipper. When I was younger, I struggled and ended up waiting tables, and I remember what it was like to be on that side of the business.
Whenever I go out, I tip generously. My average tip is always 35% to 40% of the bill. That usually works out at about £100.
If I park my car I usually tip about £50, not because I’m being flash but because I know that next time they’ll look after me. The largest tip I gave was £1,000 at the Waterside Inn at Bray in Berkshire.
Do you have any credit cards?
I have a gold Mastercard with a £250,000 limit which I’ve reached and gone over a few times. I also have a platinum Visa, a gold Visa and a platinum Morgan Stanley card.
I use them for pretty much everything, from buying cars to grocery shopping. I think the combined credit limit is something like £750,000.
The most I’ve spent on a single item is probably about £75,000. It was for a watch or a car, I can’t remember exactly.
My normal credit-card spend is about £50,000 to £60,000 a month. I don’t always pay off the bills so interest charges can be quite high, although not so high that they are difficult to manage.
Are you a saver or a spender?
A spender, or rather a consistent and persistent investor. Everything I do in life is based upon investing in something: opening restaurants; financing movies; buying a football club; flying my dad around the world.
Every year I ask my father where he would like to go on holiday and then I pay for him and an old army colleague of his to go there. My father is a very fit man and a former footballer who is 59 but acts like he’s 10 years younger.
This year he went to Peru. The year before that he went to Germany to watch all the World Cup games from first to last.
How much did you earn last year?
Not quite £10m, but getting there.
I’m funding a movie and I’ve also recently bought and invested in a chain of bars called Club Bar & Dining in the West End of London. I also have a property company in Spain where I’ve invested £10m. I built 25 villas with that in Marbella.
The money I make from Crystal Palace goes straight back into the club.
Have you ever been really hard up?
In my early twenties, before I set up Pocket Phone Shop, I started a mobile-phone business which didn’t work out. I fell out with my business partner at the time and ended up in a lot of financial trouble so I moved to America to start again.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/money/article2367182.ece
I survived by waiting on tables in New York, earning something like $500 a week. At my worst point, I was living in a hotel on 116th Street in Spanish Harlem. The hotel had one bathroom between 18 bedrooms. I lived there for about six months but eventually sold my gold bracelet to get a flight back to London.
What is the most lucrative work you have ever done? Did you use the fee for something special? Selling my mobile-phone business for £73m. Andrew Briggs and I started it by investing £15,000 each. We split the profits when we sold it, so we got about £36m each.
I used £11m of the proceeds to buy Crystal Palace and I’ve spent another £24m on the club since.
Do you own a property? Apart from the Spanish properties, which are more of a business, I have a home in Marbella. The nine-bedroom villa cost me about £6m in 2001. It has a six-car garage, a tennis court, a full sized football pitch, an olympic-sized swimming pool and a cinema room. I recently sold my three-bedroom penthouse in Chelsea overlooking Battersea Park for £2.5m. I’m in the process of looking to buy somewhere else, either in Malibu in California, where I might be doing some business, or somewhere else in London.
When I’m in London I stay at the Grosvenor hotel where I’ve had a permanent suite for the past seven years. It costs a couple of hundred thousand a year.
Do you invest in shares? I invest in people’s businesses as well as the stock market. Last year I probably had about £1m in shares, mostly in technology firms. Currently I have about £750,000 in the stock market. I use stockbrokers such as Charles Stanley and am agreeing a deal with Hargreaves Hale. I tend to allow them to make decisions about what shares to buy.
Do you have any Isas? Nope. I don’t feel I need them.
Do you have a pension or other retirement plan? I’m not a huge fan of pensions. I think I’ll probably manage on the money that I have already.
What has been your worst investment? If you’re talking purely in terms of finance, I would have to say the football club. Even though I’m making money from it, I still haven’t recovered my £35m investment. From an emotional standpoint, however, it’s been my best as well.
What aspect of our taxation system would you change? I think there needs to be some reform of inheritance tax, which I see as a completely soulless, immoral tax. It’s punishing people who have worked hard all their lives.
What is your financial priority? I don’t feel I have one other than wanting my investments to work. I especially want this movie that I’m working on to be successful. I’m the first British producer to sole-fund a movie in 35 years. I’m doing it simply because I enjoy and believe in it.
Do you have a money weakness? I invest in a lot of people but they’re not always the right people to help. I once lent a friend £2m. He didn’t pay me back. It’s a long story but, needless to say, he’s not my friend anymore. It has made me slightly more cynical but not so much that I’m not willing to take some risks.
What is the most extravagant thing you have ever bought? A football club is quite an extravagant purchase. Apart from the costs in running it, I’ve bought some extras such as a Boodles & Dunthorne diamond ring for £100,000 to celebrate when we reached the Premiership last year.
I also have 15 cars. Nine are in Spain and six in London. My favourite is the titanium silver Aston Martin Vanquish. I bought that a couple of years ago for £200,000. I also have a McLaren SLR, a Mercedes SL65 AMG, a Jaguar XJ, a Porsche Carrera, a Lamborghini Gallardo, a Ferrari 612 and a Ferrari 660. I also have a yacht moored in Marbella. I bought it nine months ago for £3m. It costs £150,000 a year to berth it, £60,000 a year to clean it and about £200,000 a year just to take it out – all good fun.
Do you play the lottery? What would you do if you won? I don’t agree with it. I think money is something you have to earn through hard work. If I won, I’d give it to charity – maybe something that helped disadvantaged kids.
What is the most important lesson you have learnt about money? Money is one of the least important things. Don’t do things for money; do things for success.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/money/article2367182.ece
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Comments
3-4 million?
orange to$$er
You can't buy class.
PJW.
Slimes replied:Money is one of the least important things. Don’t do things for money; do things for success.
Don't you generally find that the people who say money is not important, have far more money than they know what to do with?
But how does he make money out of Palace at the moment?
forgot to mention the feeling on saturday - priceless.
Jesus what an utter prick! No class whatsoever!
Seems to me that the Tangerine Man (BTW, nice one AFKA) is a natural for the new investigatory panel on educational provision for backward children.
An i'd bet most of that fortune on him being an incredibly unhappy one too.
There are three things you can never properly buy in life Jordan; love, class and happiness.
And you are the prime example.
I hope security is tight at 'Chez Jordan', because anyone reading that with an interest in burglary and extortion has just found themselves a new target.
SJ, that really wasn't big or very clever!
Seriously he is one of the most obnoxious people i've ever had to read about.
im sure he'll get his just deserts one day.
Agreed! His old man must have been a child prodigy!
He is not happy and so has concluded that money doesn't make you happy. Nor sh!t hair. Nor being involved with Palace (unsurprisingly) and not even if you believe Uri Gellar and think that the colour orange has positive properties and paint yourself in it from head to toe. Basically he's a sad c***.
Dusty
I've now got this vision of Harry Hill bashing his hand against his head and whining 'but they look so alike', before rolling up his sleeve to produce a car-shaped watch !!
To make up for a tiny tinkle....
ha ha, you crazy guy. What a man !! What a hero !!!
absolute bell....
How does flying his dad around the World constitute an investment exactly? Is he going to take a percentage of his earnings when he starts his new job as a Geography teacher?
For 'all good fun' read
'really, I am fun - would probably be more fun if I had some friends to take with me though. Fancy it? The hired help won't talk to me and I've heard them call me Simon 'Boredom' behind my back. I can't even get any of the footy lads along. I tried to trick Dowie into thinking it was part of his management duties to come with me but he just resigned to avoid it. I showed him though. Ha. 1-0 to the Jordster. And yet more money. One less friend though. Well, I say friend, he was more of an employee really. Still who needs friends anyway, I'll just go and spend some more money. Then I'll enjoy that so much that I'll forget whether I wear it on my wrist or drive it. Talking of wrist, think I'm going to go and have one off it...."
lol dude, harry hill tv burb is a good show
Maybe the creditors are closing in on him.
<Shakes head in amazement>