Bernie Ecclestone

“Rather than you taking 30%, I'll pay you five million dollars a year, going up by one million every year, up to nine million at the end of this term, in exchange for your percentage of the TV.”

“In Bernie's first year running the show, he takes the average prize and fee payment up to 40,000 dollars a year. So four X in one year. And then a couple of years later by the mid seventies, it's up to a 150 K per race. And then by the end of the decade, he's …”

“But by 2016, CVC is now down to a 35% ownership stake. They've pulled out a total of four and a half billion dollars of cash through a combination of the debt and equity sales. Remember, they and Bernie only put in nine hundred million to start.”

“Bernie, starting in 1993, becomes the highest paid corporate executive in Britain, taking home in 1993, 44.5 million dollars in cash, and that's only what's reported to Her Majesty the Crown in that year, as we'll get into.”

“Nobody writes anything down, because Bernie never writes anything down, and when the dust finally gets settled, and many decades later, all of the books and stuff become public through a whole series of court cases, turns out Bernie's actually taking eight per…”

“So at various times, Bernie was serving in a principal role in all of the major F-one stakeholder categories. Team owner, race promoter, official FIA representative, and of course, CEO and owner of FOPA and de facto the league itself. And I think at every poin…”

“All told CVC and Bernie for his portion spend about two billion dollars acquiring 100% ownership. They finance 1.1 billion of it with another set of debt. So they put nine hundred million of cash equity into the deal”

“This continued until Liberty takes over in 2017. He had a few lawyers and finance people to make it all function, but there was no marketing department for F-one. There was no Research or data department. There was no sales department besides Bernie.”