Who Owns bet365 and How Rich Are They?

Bet365 is owned by the same family that started it over two decades ago. Founded by Peter Coates, his daughter Denise, and brother John, bet365 has grown into one of the world’s biggest privately held gambling enterprises.

Who Owns bet 365? Inside the Coates Family Fortune

From inauspicious beginnings in a portakabin in Stoke-on-Trent, the Coates family built a digital juggernaut that now serves tens of millions of global punters. In 2025, the family fortune is estimated at nearly £10 billion, making Denise Coates one of the wealthiest women in the world. 

Let’s break down the exact ownership structure of the company, who actually owns bet365, and just how wealthy the Coates family has become. 

The Origins of Bet365

Long before bet365 became a household name, the Coates family ran a chain of local betting shops around Stoke-on-Trent. Love of a proper wager was in Denise Coates’ blood from an early age. When she finally returned home after receiving a rather fancy-sounding degree in Econometrics from Sheffield University, she was drawn back into the family business. 

What sealed her destiny was her belief in the internet and the future of gambling in 2000, long before it was a thing. In a massive roll of the dice, the family snapped up the bet365 domain, as well as mortgaged their shops for £15 million with the Royal Bank of Scotland to launch an internet-based sportsbook and online casinos. 

Despite initially being an online sportsbook focused on UK football/soccer and horse racing, the company soon began evolving and innovating. In years to come, its adoption of in-play betting would change how gamblers engage with live sports. 

By 2005, she would pay off the RBS loan in full and sell the land-based shops for £40 million as her future became clear and the family’s gamble became not only a household name in England but soon in Europe and the world.

Bet365 Business Performance

Once the company had sold off its dated land-based business model, growth exploded. Revenue often doubled from 2005 to 2025. By 2015, though, only a handful of hardened and ruthless competitors remained in the UK online gaming market.

Realizing that international growth was the easiest way to continue profits, the company would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in North America, Latin America, and Asia. Heading into the COVID pandemic, the company had nearly £3 billion in revenue and a couple of billion in cash reserves.

Denver HQ bet365

From 2024, the US strategy finally began paying dividends with the company once again booking almost £400 million in profits. Key to this turnaround was the US market, where the company now operates in 13 states. 

Getting that number into double digits will be both time-consuming and expensive. Still, the company recently doubled down, spending more than $135 million on a new US headquarters in Denver, Colorado, which will eventually employ 1,000 people, to solidify expansion plans. 

Who Owns bet365 Today? 

Denise Coates has seen her share of the company increase from 50.1% two decades ago to around 58% as her parents bequeathed more and more shares. Her brother John has also seen his share of the company tick up slightly to around 25% due to his parents’ tax planning preparations. 

He has also taken full ownership of Stoke City Football Club as the company exited its China-facing operations and began preparing the business for a public sale by stepping away from troubled jurisdictions and selling off some of the non-gaming entities it had acquired over the last twenty-five years.  

While family patriarch Peter has seen his shares dwindle as they were awarded to the children, he remains a still very active Chairman of the company. Long-time family friend and early investor Will Roseff also owns a small but significant stake, widely reported to be 6.7%.

The tight family control over the company allows them to reinvest profits rather than argue with shareholders, and that remains a big reason why Bet365 has so long avoided the public markets that have bedeviled rivals like DraftKings and Entain.

It also allows them to invest in new jurisdictions at rates that might make public executives wince. For example, the company is reputed to be unhappy with its 2.5% share of the US market, which some analysts believe will be worth north of $23 billion by the end of this decade.

Denise Coates’ Net Worth Revealed

Bet365 may be the race car, but it’s still very much Dense Coates in the driver’s seat, and she is one of the most highly compensated CEO’s in the world. In 2025, she and her family were listed as having a net worth of  £9.45 billion, and she regularly drew a salary in excess of £200 million up until 2024, and in a good year, another £100 million in company dividends. Forbes listed her individual net worth in 2025 as $8 billion USD.

Her primary residence is a £90 million home on 52 acres in Betchton, England, a half-hour drive from the bet365 offices in Stoke on Trent. The family is notoriously tight about privacy and seldom holds real estate or wealth in their personal names, but with Denise’s total compensation package worth almost £1.5 billion in the past five years, she has likely bought up extensive real estate in the local area and around the world.

Legacy and Influence

Few other entrepreneurs have shaped online betting quite like Denise Coates. She not only helped pioneer the way digital wagering came to be in the UK, but has spent the last 20 years making almost every decision about how her company would evolve in a rugged, unforgiving online landscape. 

Through the company’s foundation, the Coates Family has donated tens of millions of dollars annually to healthcare, education, and social welfare causes, a significant portion of which is focused on their hometown and the surrounding area. 

However, like many, their success has not been without controversy. Critics often point to executive pay for the family, as well as the broader impact of gambling issues, which affect about 2.5% of UK residents. Still, the company continues to fund both responsible gambling and charitable outreach.

Ultimately, the family legacy is one of immense wealth, unparalleled success, and profound privacy, all mixed with a sense of responsibility to the society that helped shape their success.

Is Bet365 About to be Sold?

Patriarch Peter is 87 in 2025, and Denise is still relatively young. With little to no interest from the children in the business, succession plans need to be in place in case of an emergency or eventual retirement.

The common-sense idea would be to sell a stake in the company to another casino or sportsbook operator, or to take the business public, probably in America due to perceived valuations. In a perfect world, it would involve both in that order. 

All of this speculation boiled over in the spring of 2025, with some media analysts calling a deal almost certain and valuing the company at about $12 billion USD. And while the company could allocate a large portion of any sale or public listing toward expansion, especially to reach its double-digit market share goals in the US, Denise Coates has made no bones about her preference for privacy and autonomy.  

Conclusion

The family that took a couple of local betting shops, leveraged them to the hilt, and gambled everything, won. Today, the company is worth billions and employs thousands worldwide. 

Denise Coates herself is the wealthiest woman in Britain, and still manages the day-to-day operations, with her brother and father by her side.

With expansion in the US still picking up steam, and heated speculation about a private sale or IPO, you can bet that this company and this family’s story is far from over.

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