How Billionaire Boss Can Breaking Turmoil and Trouble for Sotheby’s

But, unfortunately, the timing of Drahi’s acquisition of Sotheby’s was unfortunate. Six months after the deal was completed, the coronavirus pandemic shut down the art market. The main auction house, led by Sotheby’s, was contested for online operations, but public sales fell by about a third. Then, for a while, good times roared. But now, the art market has become an area of ​​stress and anxiety, continuing the first extended contraction of a generation.

During the same period, Drahi’s wider business empire encountered the worst crisis of his career. Altice was attacked by rising interest rates after amassing $600 billion in debt, while seeing its brand indifferent performance on both sides of the Atlantic. In the summer of 2023, one of Drahi’s closest business partners was arrested after a corruption investigation. Altice USA’s current stock is trading at about $2.50, less than one-tenth of its price in 2019.

Sotheby’s has always had a new, unstable identity: the subject of the billionaire’s indulgence and his latest corporate experiment. At a 2022 French Senate hearing, Delahi said he had no power or influence to buy Sotheby’s. Instead, he intends to triple the value of his investment. “This is always the goal of entrepreneurs,” he said.

For those who are stuck in experiments, it has been at the extreme. According to some estimates, hundreds of employees have left Sotheby’s quarter-of-the-fourths of the workforce since 2019, including dozens of experts who have brought essential goods to the company’s bottom line. (Sotheby’s controversy.) Last year, sales fell 23%. As auction houses cut costs, Drahi-controlled holding companies withdraw more than a billion dollars in dividends from their business, in order to manage their debt burden.

Last fall, Drahi sold a minority stake in Sotheby’s (limiting it to a third of the company) for about a billion dollars after a round of layoffs as ADQ, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. The move has sparked speculation that he might sell his business directly. But people close to Drahi insist that, at least in Europe, it is more likely to give up on his telecom holdings than a telecom company that abandons Sotheby’s. “This is for his grandson,” the colleague said.

The question is what he will leave behind. Drahi and his team won’t be the first or last corporate giant to stumble and stumble in the changes in the art market. “It’s a niche,” New York’s leading arts consultant told me. “If you don’t understand, that’s what happened. They’re not artists. Maybe they’ll never be artists.” But another version is that Drahi deliberately hollowed out a great auction house in the world, turning it from an institution of taste and knowledge to something closer to a universal platform that sets prices for things that don’t have prices and cuts prices along the way. In other words, make Sotheby’s more like everything else. “I think if he could automate the business, put it online and take out everyone…that’s his goal,” said a former director. “It’s just pure money.” But is there anything else?

The word “auction” comes from Latin auctiowhich means “increase”. But this is always more complicated than this. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus Describes Babylonian custom of selling girls to get married. The more attractive bid was sold first. The process is then opened up and the suitor wins the “simplest” and he will receive the smallest dowry. Auctions can be as diverse as human desires. In Italy, a whisper auction was held in Japan, while an auction was held. Cod has been sold at the fish market in Hull, north England for years, through the drop bid (Dutch law) before switching to English later that day or rising. At 17 miles downstream of Grimsby, fish auctions behave the opposite.

In 193 AD, the Roman Empire was sold to the highest bidder, Marcus Didius Julianus, which caused an unforgettable case of remorse by the buyer. Edward Gibbon reflects: “He spent a sleepless night; in his own mind, his rash was spinning stupid.” (Two months later, Emperor Julianus was murdered.) The auction is based on an illusory symmetry of hope. Buyers feel bargaining, sellers want war. The verification you want is because others want it too. Everyone believes in their ability to control the situation. Samuel Pepys, London, 1662 Dialoguewatching the auction of three ships “with candles” (spending an inch of the length of time the candles melted), and noticing that one bidder was particularly successful: “He told me that like the flames went out, the smoke fell, which was something I had never observed before, and he did know when and when to bid.”

The auctioneer’s task is to dramatize the possibilities of selling while trying to control them at the same time. “To be sure to be assured of the audience’s confidence and then dominate it in the best way,” Peter Wilson, president of legendary Sotheby’s, Tell The magazine was in 1966. Wilson, a former British intelligence official, led the company’s expansion into the U.S. market and launched its first night sale in the fifties, namely a dribbling dress and a TV camera. Even today, when people complain that most of the excitement of live tenders disappears, the sales rooms at the main auctions still retain a single atmosphere of politics and blackmail. Money appears in the church like sin: sometimes its existence is unspeakable. Sometimes that’s the only thing to say.

One Tuesday in early March, I stopped at the Modern and Modern Night Auction in London. Equal sales in 2023 bring in $2 million, led by Wassily Kandinsky landscape Sold forty-five million. This year, Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara conducted a large-scale hypnotic study of a girl with a “cosmic eye (in a milky white lake)” that is estimated to be less than a quarter. The mood is fragile and uncertain. Earlier in the day, tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump made global markets uneasy.

Minutes before the auction began, the walls were lined with Sotheby’s experts, arranged sharply by cell phones, while the cashmere and expensive Anoraks were roaming around. Oliver Barker, the star auctioneer of the past decade, wore a shirt. When bidding in a “new place”, Buck is always happiest, meaning fresh competitors have entered the competition. For the rest of the time, he was more of a duplicate but firm personal trainer, asking for another representative. “Please give me six, Alex,” he said, not really to give Alex Branczik, president of modern and modern art, who is fighting over the phone for Nara’s chief bidder. Buck wants another one hundred thousand pounds. Buck said, “This is six million and five hundred thousand.” “Do you want to give me six?” Blanchick gave him six.

Auction houses like “confirm” or even “passionate” bidding. Lisa Brice’s “After the ommah“A bold, red Mise enscene with the outline of Nicki Minaj, sold for £4.4 million, is the artist’s record. The dark Alberto Burri,”Sacco E Nero 3,” began in 1955, an estimated 4 million pounds. But most games are thin and fast. Christopher Wool The canvas on the wall is facing the right. Again, Barker extracted an offer and again below the estimate. Wool is for sale in fifty-one seconds. Overall, night sales (Shotheby’s first major auction in 2025) have made over £600 million (including fees) 40% less than the previous year.

Even people who are closely associated with big auctions can’t figure out whether they are great or terrible businesses these days. Given Sotheby’s alleges that “buyer’s premium” (actually a commission), its share is priced at a million dollars and is usually a seller’s fee, the profit margin should be large. Long-term employees insist, “This is never profitable.” It’s just that profits are hard to obtain. During the artistic boom in the 1980s, Sotheby’s annual profit was $10 billion. Twenty-five years later, in 2014, at the peak of the next wave, the auction house made $29 million, the price of mid-range Basquet.

Part of the problem is the huge expense of leaving the show on the road. Sotheby’s and Christie’s fantasy is because they are. Sotheby’s has premises in forty countries. It hired more than 1,500 people when it acquired Drahi. There is only one way for each party to manage costs, marketing, transportation, insurance and nearly five hundred sales per year. A Paris-based art consultant “basically, you’re basically profiting in December,” he worked among two big giants. “Until November, you’re paying for the company’s fixed fees.”

There are many parts to the main auction houses. “Sotheby’s is actually three businesses, it’s one business,” a former employee told me under Tad Smith. Since the late 1980s, Sotheby’s has provided loans and other financial products to prevent Art (actually anything that auction houses will sell) as collateral. When Drahi acquired the company, Sotheby’s Financial Services borrowed about $800 million a year.