Lord Sugar: From entrepreneur to Apprentice

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This is not a recommendation or offer to buy, sell, or attain any specific investment or service. A stocky man in his early 50s news and a red carpet, a metal blade sits on his shoulder. In front of him holding the sword is a little lady, she's dressed all in yellow with pearls around her neck. It is of course the late Queen Elizabeth II. We're in Buckingham Palace and we're at the dawn of a new millennium. The kneeling man closes his eyes and thinks of his mother and father no longer alive and he chuckles. Not bad for a working class Jewish boy from the East End. He's just been made a knight. In a few years he'll become a lord and a billionaire. Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Every episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money. We take them from zero to their first million and then from a million onto a billion. My name is Zingsing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster. And I'm Simon Jack on the BBC's Business Editor. And our billionaire and this episode has been suggested by a lot of listeners. Alex Chapman from York in the UK put it very well. A rags to rich history. His career touches on class mobility, media influence and how fame reshapes public perception of business success. Does his blunt old school style represent authentic entrepreneurship or outdated arrogance? We're talking about Alan Sugar, barren sugar of Clapton, in the London borough of Hackney or Lord Sugar to you and me. Now the 79 year old is one of the UK's most famous businessmen and he's currently worth one and a half billion dollars. Oh yes. Have you had much dealings with Lord Sugar in the past? I did have to go and interview him in the I think mid 2000s at the launch of the, I'm sure we'll get onto this on the show The Apprentice, which was basically borrowed from the current president of the United States about sort of taking some wannabes and trying to turn them into entrepreneurial geniuses. And the funny thing I remember about this and maybe we'll get to this too is that during this time he came in in a massive Rolls Royce which had the number plate AMS-1 Alan Michael Sugar-1 and it was parked diagonally across two disabled parking bays which are the closest parking bays to the front door of the old television centre. My eyebrows were raised by it, it was there for several hours. Was there anyone sitting in the car waiting for him to come out? Like my memory doesn't relate. Or certainly a strong statement on the launch of your new television show. Yeah, so yes and Alan Sugar says a brilliant story. He's a working-class boy from East London. He began his career in the 1960s selling car aerials out of the back of his van. And in '80s he became one of the richest people in Britain selling computers to the mass market. And in the 2000s he followed in the footsteps of Donald Trump as we've discussed becoming host of the UK version of the TV show The Apprentice. And that's probably where most of our listeners encountered him. Because there's no nonsense. Sometimes you'd say downright rude. One-liners made him a household name in the UK. But he's also come under fire for controversial comments he's made on social media. Yeah, but let's go and try and answer listener Alex's question. Let's travel back to post-war London to find out how he did it. Alan Michael Sugar was born in 1947. His parents as we alluded to in an opening were Jewish and working class. Both of them were nearly in their 40s when he was born and he was the youngest of four children. Alan grew up on a council estate in Hackney in the East End of London. This area was nothing like it is today. Still incredibly poor and run down at the time. Much of the area had just been completely bombed to bits during the war. No, it's quite posh up and coming and trendy these days. But back then it was not. His father was a tailor and worked in a garment factory the family was poor and money was always a worry at home. The electricity meter that kept the house warm would sometimes run out by Thursday afternoon before his dad was paid on Friday. So they'd need to borrow a shilling from their neighbour and just so you know in the old days you had to literally put coins in a meter in the house to get the electricity to start flowing through. Alan said life was all about not having any money, not having anything and working very, very hard. I didn't want to have to live that way, he said. And Alan spent his childhood trying to make money. He worked at Greengrocer on the weekends. He took to hustling the streets where he washed cars. He sold unused fabric trimmings to the rag and bone men. These are men who collect unwanted household items and sell them onto merchants. And when Alan was barely a teenager, he also noticed that when the roads in his area were being resurfaced there were uncovered wooden road blocks that were just discarded. And he took those, cut them up, sold them as cheap fire starting fuel. And you know this is just one of his money-making schemes that many of which are too long to list here. Yeah, a real hustler. So from a young age he's entrepreneurial, resourceful. But at school he said he wasn't one of the brainy ones. He was fascinated by electronics. So he got the school buffs, as he called them. I think that's short for boffins. Classic Alan's sugar is in there. To help him make a simple radio receiver to pick up radio stations. Left school at 16, but by this time he claims he was making more money than his dad. He said in his quotas, "My dad always worried about putting food on the table. When I left school I said that's never going to happen to me." Initially he applied to IBM. Now remember this was the early 1960s and the computer industry was just getting started. But he actually ended up failing the aptitude test. So instead he had a few clerical jobs, but he didn't enjoy them. As he said, "I was never going to be a rabbi or a priest put it that way. I was a salesman." And salesmen sailed close to the wind. He started working as a salesman for an electrical goods wholesaler where he earned £20 a week. Pretty good money in those days actually. But at age 18 he started dating a hairdresser called Anne and then he proposed to her. He wanted to buy a house and ask for a raise at work. They said no, so he left. But Alan hadn't stopped the side hustles. And in some weeks they earned him more than his day job actually did. So he decided it was time to go it alone in business. He took £100 out from his savings. He spent £50 quid to buy a secondhand minivan. £8 on the insurance and said it was a good deal. Unfortunately it was always breaking down, especially when I had to go on business rounds. It taught me you get what you pay for. The rest he spent buying cheap car areas, which he started selling out with the back of the van. And he set a target to earn £60 profit per week and says I achieved it by Wednesday. Now £60 might not sound like a lot of money now, but it was at the time. It was actually double the average weekly wage. So in 1968, age 21, he incorporated his company, AMS, Alan Michael Sugar Trading, Limited, Amstrad for short. And incorporating basically means, you know, rather than being a sole trader, you have a company and entity, which is a business, which kind of operates as a legal thing, separate from yourself. And some advantages in that, in that you pay the money into it, rather than paying income tax directly as a person, the money goes into the business. If you take money out of the business in the form of dividends, sometimes you can pay less tax. But probably normal thing to do for someone who is, you know, someone like him to set up his own company. That makes sense. And that was a year he also married Anne. A year on, they also had their first son with two more children coming soon after. And with the family of his old, he set about evolving the business. He opened an office in London. He hired, actually hired his dad as his first employee and paid him more than he earned in the garment factories. Which is quite a flex, I think, to hire your own dad. Yeah, I wonder how the dynamics of that work. I mean, probably makes more sense. If you can do something for a family member, pay them for doing something useful, get, pay them more. Does it alter the sort of, you know, the power structures within the family dynamic? I'm betting it did. Alan worked hard. He was in the office at 6 a.m. He didn't go home till 9 p.m. He was importing low cost consumer electronics and reselling them wholesale to retailers. And his focus was, in his words, the mass market, it's the truck driver and his wife under the market. Audio equipment was becoming especially popular at this time because more people could afford stereo systems at home. But Alan's profit margins were small. He had a big breakthrough, though, when he figured out how to undercut his competitors by sourcing cheap materials for high-fi turntable covers. And he said, that was it, the start of the big time for me. Within weeks of starting production, I was making £6,000 a month at a profit margin of over £400 per cover. £6,000, by the way, was equivalent to roughly £14,400 at the time. But back then, this was, was enough to buy a house. - People used to get quiet and still do, get very particular about their high-fire equipment. And so having a cover, so where you would put the disk, you put the cover for when it's not being used. And Vinyl's made a comeback, hasn't it? - And it has, you know, so maybe a young Alan Sugar listening right now, like go back into that business. - So he was onto something here, and he repeated this same trick, outsourcing, undercutting competitors with other electronic equipment. He imported goods cheaply from Asia, putting Amstrad name on them, and selling for a profit in the UK. He said, "I was always gonna be "the pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap, under the market." - He also acquired a factory and grew his workforce, manufacturing some of his items in the UK. And Alan made the point to sit on new production lines and assemble the first units. And this helped him envision his next designs. He enjoyed being in the thick of the detail. And over the '70s, the business grew. And by 1979, his turnover was nearly six million pounds with profits approaching one million. So his success drew a little bit of attention. He turned down a bid from a competitor, Lasky, so he offered two million pounds to acquire 75% of the company. Instead, it was time to take his company public. That means selling shares to the public in what we call an initial public offering or IPO. We've been down this road with some of billions before. So in 1980, Amstrad started trading on the London Stock Exchange. Alan sold 25% of his shares for two million pounds and a much better deal than what Lasky's was offering. He said it was a great deal for me. Up until then, I had no personal wealth. Everything was in the company. It was time for me to cash in, in part, on all my efforts from back when I started trading in my own name 14 years earlier. So he's come really far. And at the age of 33, Alan Sugar is now a millionaire. That milestone passed. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) So let us go now from a million to a billion. It's now 1980. It's the beginning of Fatcher's Britain, Margaret Fatcher, the Prime Minister of the UK. And in Alan's words, the 1980s gave anyone the opportunity to succeed. The establishment was smashed definitely. The old school tie went out the window. Anybody can do anything now. And I remember this period. It was basically this kind of very public, you know, unashamed, money-making opportunistic era. - Well, this was the start of a transformative decade for British technology. Computers were still expensive, because specialist machines were used mainly by businesses and enthusiasts. But, you know, we're also on the cusp of a revolution, the personal computer revolution. The cost of components was getting cheaper, so there were opportunities opening up for mass market electronics firms. - Alan Feltic wouldn't be rocket science for Amstrad to make a low-cost machine to compete with the other home computer makers, Commodore, Acorn, Sinclair, with the familiar names those days. He felt the existing computers look like pregnant calculators is where he put it. His computer would be a slick all-in-one system. - Did you have a home computer at this time? - Well, there was two machines I had. One was called the Sinclair ZX81, which was one of the early machines. And then there was something called the Sinclair Spectrum. And then there were various iterations on this. There was the VIC-20, the Commodore 64. And as a young, you know, sort of 12-year-old boy, everyone was obsessed with them. You would get these brochures and look at them and say, and lust after these computers, even if you didn't know how to use them. - Well, in 1984, Alan launched the first Amstrad computer. And that affordable PC really took off and sales dwarfed anything he'd ever seen before. And within a year, computers were 70% of Amstrad sales, so he was really riding that wave. - Yeah, his next product was the Amstrad PCW, essentially a glorified word process that included a screen, a keyboard, and a printer. And it was advertised as the replacement for the typewriter and was wildly popular. - I mean, I can imagine why this would be better than a typewriter. I remember there was once a time when I collected vintage typewriters. - What? - I know I just thought they were really cool. - Where are they now? - Gathering dust in my mum's house. - Really? - Because you just, well, I couldn't figure out how to actually replace the real. Is that why you call them, the ribbon, which allowed you to type? - The uncool thing about them was that if you ever made a mistake on a typewriter, because you're physically bam, you know, hitting the key onto the page, you would have to go back and put a little strip of something to try and erase it, whereas a word processor, essentially, as we'd know, means that you didn't have to print it until it was all done. So you could make your changes along the way before you actually printed it out. I mean, understandably, a lot of people bought these computers, and despite all having only been in that market for a couple of years, Alan Sugar bought one of his competitors, Sinclair Research, the five million. - Oh, makers of the spectrum, then. - Right, well, there you go. And Sinclair apparently had been struggling, and that do actually gave Sir Alan control of a very strong, but underperforming product, the spectrum, as we've talked about, and Amstrad successfully relaunched and sold these at scale. So they made profits well beyond the cost of acquisition. - And then 1986, a big moment, 'cause they made an IBM compatible computer, meaning that it was designed to run the same software, it's the same hardware architecture as the IBM PC, which was becoming and have become the industry standard for business computing. The campaign slogan was, and this is pure Alan Sugar, compatible with you know, who priced as only we know how. So, you know, this is computing for the masses. Well, Amstrad doubled its profit and market valuation every year in the 1980s, and eventually peaked over a billion pounds. So, by 1987, Alan was 41 years old. He had a 45% stake in the company, making him worth more than 700 million dollars, and he was described at the time in the New York Times as Europe's most successful entrepreneur of the 1980s. - And people were getting to know him in the UK, he was becoming a bit of a public figure. He was described in the press as street wise and bullish, he was pugnacious, but effective, and there was a begrudging respect for his success. But, there was also hostility from the city establishment, which Alan threw right back at them. He was now the 15th richest man in Britain, and he set about spending like it. He bought a fleet of expensive cars, Rolls Royces, as we, I've seen one of those, Bentley's and Big Houses in Essex and Florida. He's living the dream. - Alan had been riding high on the spectacular rise of Amstrad, but it also wasn't going to last. The stock market crash of 1987 came, and it slashed the value of his company, including a record one day four of 400 million pounds. That is a lot, and it wasn't going to be easy to bounce back. By the end of the '80s, PCs were becoming increasingly commoditized, and Amstrad was losing its pricing advantage. They also had to record a series of PCs after thousands of customers reported problems with the hard disk. He was awarded compensation for the hard drive fault. Years later, but the damage reputationally had been done. - I remember this, I was a teenager at the time, and it was amazing how quickly Amstrad went from being like, "Oh, I've got an Amstrad, aren't I great?" To like, what a load of rubbish, because people like Dell and IBM themselves were getting into the mass market as well. An Amstrad was seen as a kind of shabby-- - Plenty alternative. - Second best, exactly. Annual profits plummeted from 160 million in 1988 to 44 million in 1990, and Alan Sugar said, "We expanded too quickly, we screwed up. "We didn't have enough engineering, enough understanding "of a technology as it got more complex, "and I take total responsibility for that." Instead, he started to diversify Amstrad into the burgeoning satellite television market. Big moment. - Now it's time for one of our other billionaires we've covered on the show to enter the scene. A guy called Rupert Murdoch. Now, in the late 1980s, Murdoch wanted to launch satellite television in the UK and call it Sky. So he called up Alan, and Murdoch said, "He can make large quantities at a reasonable price. "He believed in simplicity and he believed in speed "and delivery and low price. "So it's suited us all around." - Well, Alan had originally been croted 30 pounds per satellite dish to manufacture too expensive at that time. So he went back to some of his first principles. He looked at the dish and he said, "Basically, "and this is probably true, isn't it?" It was just like a dustbin lid. So he suggested finding manufacturers who already stamped out metal products rather than treating it as a specialist cool kind of technical aerospace style component. So Amstrad saw steel that cost about 70 pence per dish in raw materials. Then found a metal pressing firm who used to making things like car body panels to manufacture them. And Amstrad became the sole supplier of the receiving equipment, manufacturing both the satellite dishes and the receiver boxes at a crucial moment when satellite is taking off. - He was also diversifying his interests firstly into property. He created Amstrad, Alan, Michael Sugar Property, you're sensing a theme here, a property portfolio that he grew substantially throughout the '90s. He invested in officers, industrial sites, commercial developments across London. And in fact, an apprentice winner would later say that Alan had advised him, "You make money from property and do business for fun." But at the same time, Alan started taking an interest in football. In 1991, he teamed up with manager Terry Vannells to buy Tottenham Hotspur Spurs Football Club, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. And he beat Robert Maxwell to the purchase former newspaper owner. It seems to happen to a lot to Maxwell, if you listen to our Rupert Mo. episode. He bought 40% of the shares in Tottenham Hotspur, made initial investment of eight million pounds. And at first, he was hailed as a savior. But. as chairman, Alan made it clear he saw Spurs as a business proposition and not a labor of love, which did not go down well with the fans. He even took pride in declaring he wasn't a fan of the team and he didn't even particularly like football. Now there's probably quite a lot of owners of sports teams who would fit into that catch group. Oh yeah, they've definitely taking pure advice not to say things like that. Obviously none of this went down well with the fans. They were even more unhappy when he sat Terry Vanibos. Alan said, and this is quite funny, what I didn't realise was that in football terms, I had shot Bambi. Brilliant. Yeah, and having shot Bambi, he got protesters outside his home, he received death threats. Terry Vanibos even took him to court to appeal the sacking, but actually Alan won. And Alan stuck it out. He spent the next decade at the club as chairman putting them on a sound financial footing. He was also a key supporter of Sky's successful bed for Premier League television rights, which was then called B Sky B owned by Murdoch. And this deal actually helped make live football the foundation of Sky's subscription television model. It also transformed the finances of the game itself and turned it into a multi-million-billion dollar industry. It was totally transformative for football. But Tottenham didn't have much success on the pitch during his tenure when the Daily Mail wrote a headline accusing him of being cheap and not spending money on the team. He sued the newspaper for libel. At the start of the trial, he broke down in tears, which he said was because of absolute total frustration with the newspapers. But he won and he donated £100,000 in damages to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is a famous children's hospital. By 2000, he was done with the club. He sold part of his state to the investment group Enoch for nearly £22 million, selling his remaining state seven years later for £25 million. Overall, he'd made over £30 million in profit on his initial investment, and he donated proceeds to the restoration of the Hackney Empire. This was a historic theatre near where he grew up and it basically saved them from closure. His son-in-law, and this is a game quite funny, later joked that when he asked to take Alan Sugar's daughter's hand in marriage, he hadn't seen Sugar so happy since the time he'd sold Tottenham. Hackney Empire is a wonderful building. So, you know, massively focal point in that now groovy and quite expensive neighborhood. Alan said, "I wasted 10 years of my life in that nonsense in brackets Tottenham football, and took my eye off the other ball at Amstrad. And worth taking a moment, I think, to look at what been going on at Amstrad during the 1990s. They'd struggled to produce another blockbuster computer, despite plenty of new lines and new attempts. Their game console flopped, losing out to the Sega Mega Drive. He also tried something called the Penn Pad, an early type of electronic personal organiser. He said there was an air of panic of wanting to come out with products that sold a million in the first week and a lack of patience on my behalf." But the company had been kept profitable by that satellite business, and that was booming by 2000, and that year Alan was officially recognised with a knighthood for services to the home computer and electronics industry, and he was now Sir Alan. In his words, "I think I deserved it." So he's been knighted, but when does Alan Sugar become a billionaire? How does he become a billionaire? Every year at the Sunday Times newspaper releases a list of the richest Brits. He'd been on the list since its inception in 1989, when he was the 15th richest in the country worth £430 million. But by 2003, he'd fallen to 43rd. His stake in Amstrad was worth just £7 million at that point, but his holding company, Amst Hold, was worth £459 million. Add in £150 million in other assets, including still some stake in Tottenham, Hotspur, plus Amstair, a private jet business run by his son, and the Viglin computer company, together his total wealth was £609 million. Now listening to all this, you might be saying to yourself, "Wait a second, this is nowhere near a billion." Let's explain, this is all in pound sterling, remember? And so for global continuity, our billionaires on the show are US dollar billionaires. And because of a very generous exchange rate in 2003, we consider Alan Sugar a US dollar billionaire at the ripe old age of 56. No added growth hormones are antibiotics in their meat department, means slow braised short ribs are even more satisfying. All seafood is well caught, like their vibrant sockeye salmon, or verified responsibly farmed. This is not a recommendation or offer to buy, sell, or retain any specific investment or service. Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmer's market. 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Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odo.com. That's oddo.com. So let us take him beyond a billion. What does a man do once he's conquered the business world? Well, possibly the thing many people will know him best for. In 2004, a celebrity businessman called Donald Trump may know his name. This is the one to reality TV show in the US called The Apprentice. Now it proved a big hit and the production company decided to bring it across the pond as they say to the UK. Interestingly, Alan was actually their first choice. Two of our other billionaires, Sir Philip Green and Michael O'Leary both turned the show down. But when Alan was approached, he said yes, he had a home in Florida and everyone there was raving about the US version. So he knew how popular it was in the US because of his home there. Part of his motivation he said was that he wanted to be a role model. He requested no payment for the show and when the BBC insisted giving them some money, he gave that money to the Great Ormond Street hospital. He has said, I wish to avoid people saying, what's he doing that for? Hasn't he got enough money? I really hate that feeling. So if I write an article for the newspapers or do an advert, you will always see, so Alan's fee for this article has been donated to charity. Now, if you haven't watched The Apprentice, it's quite a simple format. So a group of contestants who've put themselves forward, they fancy themselves a bit of a mini Alan sugar themselves. They put themselves forward to compete in teams on different kinds of challenges. Yeah, they've got to try and sort of basically make money out of some, you know, they'll say start a cake stall or something and make some money and they'll have to sort of try and bring entrepreneurial flair, nerve, negotiating skills, all these different qualities that it takes to make up a hit in business. And at the end of the challenge, they all assemble in Sir Alan's sugar's boardroom and he berates them or praises them or more likely berates them, how badly they've done. Mainly berates them, I think, is the formula for the show. And of course, if they don't succeed, there's the finger pointing, you're fired. Exactly. An iconic part of the show. Another good pub quiz fact is that Alan Sugar's chair is actually placed on a few inches high square board to make him appear taller than all his advisors. He's got a group of advisors who sit at the table with him while he berates at the people. Well, isn't the show proved a massive success? I must say I did watch the first few series and it was always kind of fun. The series actually won a BAFTA award, although the production team took home the statuette. So he had one made for himself. He said, why should the guy who has the lead role in the program get no credit for it at all? There was no program without me. And these other guys, the so-called creative geniuses seem to get all the gongs. Well, Alan Sugar basically made the show a hit. He became a fan favorite because of that blunt, no nonsense style, that finger pointing and saying you've been fired. There are even, if you look online, articles dedicated to some of his best boardroom put down. This is some great ones here. Oh, okay. Let's go through the list. He once said, if you nod your head any longer, I'm going to put you in the backseat of my bloody car. You were devastated when you got a B in your GCSE French. You got to be even more devastated now because you got a big F, you're fired. I mean, we have to state as well that the year-fired catchphrase was actually popularised by Donald Trump. So that's not actually something, sir, and came up with himself. No. For the first few seasons, the winner was actually employed in his company. and Alan Sugar's company, but this was changed to him investing £250,000 into the winners business in exchange for half of their company. To date, there have been 20 series Alan claims there are at least five winners of the show, who are now millionaires. He said, "I'm proud of the five. I don't feel guilty about the ones who failed. This is the real world. You got to be tough to win." But did Sir Alan the TV star still have time to do business? Well, he did. He sold Amstrad in 2007 to its biggest customer, Biscay B owned by Murdoch, for £125 million, and that's just 10% of what the business was worth at his peak in the 80s. He stepped down as chairman, he walked away with £34 million from the sale, and he said, "It was emotional to finally be giving up the reins of my child Amstrad." I can imagine that. In 2009, age 62, he was given a life peerage that is a non-hereditary title that gave him a seat in Britain's House of Lords. So basically, a life peerage means you'll call the Lord. And that was by the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. His official title became Baron Sugar of Clapton in the London Barrow of Hackney, or more simply Lord Sugar. And that peerage gave him the ability to be involved, to some extent, in law-making, scrutinising policy, holding the government to account. You got the House of Lords, which can basically look at the laws that the Commons, the House of Commons, are trying to pass, and they can suggest amendments, and sometimes get battered back between the two. He sat in the House of Lords as a Labour peer. As well as being a Lord, Gordon Brown had also made Sugar the Enterprise ZAR, the road to advise the government on small business and enterprise. And he insisted, "As far as I'm concerned, this is politically neutral. All I want to do is try and help businesses and enterprise." But in 2015, he actually quite dramatically quit the Labour party after 18 years, over what he perceived as their negative stance on business. And a year later, the then-conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, reappointed him to the Enterprise ZAR role, so a little bit of political flip-flopping. Yeah. Well, I think it's quite interesting to note that Alan Sugar was a Labour peer, because the period in which he made his money, and the style in which he made his money, I think would have been very associated with sort of facturite 1980s Britain. So I think it's quite interesting that he was a Labour party. Maybe that's his working class roots coming through, but I am just an interesting observation. In 2024, 17 years after selling Amstrad to be SkyB, he bought back the rights of the Amstrad brand name because he wanted to give it down to the family. Remember, he's got three children. And he said, "The people who had it before asked for £2 million, I go piss off, you don't even use it." His grandson now runs the digital marketing company Amstrad Digital. For Alan Sugar, family matters simpler as that in his words. Him and Anne have actually just celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary. Congratulations to them both. Today, age 79, his net worth is £1.1 billion, so around £1.5 billion. The majority of that wealth comes from his property portfolio run by his son. In recent years, he made £50 million from the sale of the Sugar Building and £30 million from selling just part of the freehold of the former Burberry HQ. He still has to his office in Essex most days, because in his words, he hates all this work from home rubbish. Good for you, Alan. He said, "I'm good at what I do. You can't teach it. You smell deals and I'll do it until I go see now." It has been quite a remarkable story for Alan Sugar, that journey from zero to a billion. Yeah, it has. He's a billionaire. And it's time now to score Lord Alan on our billionaire categories. This is kind of a fun bit of the programme, fun bit of the pod, where we basically score our billionaires from zero to ten on a number of categories including wealth, controversy, power and legacy. So let us start with wealth. Well, at £1.5 billion, he's still relatively low down on the global rich list. Entry level. He's actually 146 in this year's rich list in the UK, but globally, as you say, really bottom of the pile. But we do look at sometimes how far people have come in their life, where they're born with silver spoon in their mouth, or have they come up from very trying circumstances. On there, I think he scores quite highly. Yeah, I think you could mount an argument that he's probably one of the greatest British rags to richer stories that we have. Growing up on a cancer state in East London, bombed out Hackney, post-World War II, all the way to being a telly star and being a billionaire, that is quite a journey. And I think that's one of the reasons why he taps into things, because people see him and say, "Well, you know, he's kind of a totemic figure for like being a bit of a hustler, coming from poor background, making a ton of money, not having to doffice cap to the establishment, saying, "You know, two fingers up to you. I'm going to do it my way." That's why I think he has that kind of currency. Yes, definitely. I think that's why people, even though they might find him rude or abrasive, there's a grudging respect and admiration. Yeah. And the media often focus on his ostentatious spending. He's got Rolls Royce with Personalised Number Play, AMS1. As you've seen. I've seen it in the co-op arc. Two aeroplanes, homes in Florida and Spain. He also used to own 160 foot super yacht, but decided it wasn't cost-effective. Duh. The famously cost-effective super yachts of the 21st century. He collects Rolex and Patek Philippe watches, but he said, "They don't give me enough of them though. They keep telling me I have to get to my dealer like everyone else. Bloody cheek." I mean, he is a real character. In some ways, do you think this is a bit of a stick for him? You've met him. Yeah. There's a little bit of a kind of working class hero. I pull myself up on my own bootstraps. You know, don't give me any of your, you know, your sob stories. Just go there and sort of hustle like I did. And I think that's quite an attractive kind of bundle of values. And I think he plays very much up to it. It starts it out true and has become caricature. I mean, I love this quote from him. He goes, "Am I still Alan? Of course I am. Ask my friends of 60 years. Do I need to eat in a posh restaurant? No, give me a plate of fish and chips." Well, okay. So, wealth, I'm going to give him a, for the rags to riches, it would be a one usually because he's down the list. But because of where he's come from and the way he wears it, you know, slightly ostentatious caricature type way, I'm going to give him a four. Oh, I actually would score him higher. Really? Yeah, I think I would give him a six out of 10. Well, it's the spending and also that journey is pretty impressive. Okay. Four from me, six from you. Controversy, controversy. Actually, quite a, there is a little bit of this. Yes. Well, in 2023, he actually became embroiled in quite a high profile tax dispute in investigations by the Sunday Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Reported that he had attempted to be treated as a non-UK tax resident after receiving a dividend of about £390 million. He potentially avoided a tax bill estimated at 186 million. Yeah, they reported the plan of failed because members of the House of Lords are automatically treated as UK tax residents and that Lord Sugar alleged he wasn't warned of his ineligibility by tax advisers. So, what does it cost to be a Lord? Now we know. Yeah, exactly 186 million pounds. Well, there's no suggestion that Sugar has broken the law in attempting to avoid or reduce the bill, but they did report it open to him to claims of hypocrisy because he has publicly rebuked others for not paying UK tax while in repeatedly insisting his own approach is straightforward. Yeah, when the BBC's Amal Rajan asked him about this in an interview, he replied with a bunch of expletives, but he admits to the attempt to insist that he ultimately paid the tax. So, you know, a complicated tax situation. Yeah, and some controversial comments. Yeah. In 2013, he was investigated by police after they received a complaint about a racist tweet. He posted a photograph of a crying Chinese child and joked the kid in the middle is upset because he was told off for leaving the production line of the iPhone 5. Police did classify this as a hate incident, but that no crime had taken place. So he's got a habit of putting his foot in it. Yeah. In 2018, he was criticized for another tweet this time comparing the Senegal football team to beach sellers in Marbella. He later deleted the post and apologized saying my attempt at humor has backfired. I'll say he said he misjudged the tweet and it was not intended to cause offense. And he also faced criticism in 2008 because he insisted that equality laws actually make it more difficult for women to find jobs. Not surprising that a lot of people found those comments offensive. Exactly. He's also been accused of being a bully in his business style. The late businessman Sir John Harvey Jones used to run ICI, a big UK company once upon a time, said to him, "I never liked Alan. I always thought he was a bully. I watched his program with horror. Still watches it, though." That's right, true. Sugar has always denied charges that he's a bully, though. He said people would have reported it if lots of people were taking me to tribunals. I've got people here who have worked for me for 35 to 40 years identifying a truth is not bullying. Well, again, playing on that image of him being the straight talking-- Unvarnished. Unvarnished. You're going to not like what I've got to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. And let's not forget that once you become a caricature in a certain way, it's a bit like someone said to me that once Jimmy Hendrix set his guitar on fire at a concert. If you enter the concert when he didn't set his guitar on fire, you felt slightly short-changed. So if you become a hostage to your own image, reputation, blah, blah, blah, persona. Yeah, well, I feel like of Lord Sugar took someone inside and said you're not doing very well but it's okay we can see you're under a lot of stress we're going to put you on a performance plan it's all going to work out people would think he got lost his marbles yeah and it would actually make for quite a boring TV program potentially true you know so you do become a hostage to the mask that you put on. Okay so controversy I think quite high on this one I think but I think some of it is quite willful and and you know knowingly done so I'm going to give him a I'm going to even seven I'm going to give him a seven out of ten willful is an interesting word I think that I think that's definitely something you could say about Lord Sugar yeah okay seven from both of us on controversy controversy um power now he was involved in UK politics he sits in the House of Lords now in theory that given the ability to be involved in lawmaking scrutinising policy sending amendments back to the House of Commons in practice the House of Lords it can frustrate for some time the will of the elected representatives in the House of Commons but not for long but in a way maybe his more influential in terms of government policy and influence is as sort of the enterprise is are trying to tell government how to treat business and encourage it but also crucially if you want to exercise power in the House of Lords you also have to sit in it and actually Sir Alan Lord Sugar has not voted since 2017 so clearly not much interest there and I'm not global stage I mean he's not really a figure I don't think he did actually go down to Mara Lago Donald Trump's Florida estate because he lives down the road his place is down there he went there apparently for dinner in 2025 although on that evening he said like apparently he never actually spoke to Donald Trump okay so power I'm going to say oh he's got he's got some currency as a kind of business figure there are few people in the UK I'm thinking of Richard Branson James Dyson people who've become influential aspirational figures because they've you know made a lot of money and whatever so I think I think Alan Sugar's power is more in his there are lots of people who would love to be on the apprentice there are lots of people who think they could be a swashbuckling entrepreneur and have seen that him as a role model for that so I'm going to score him actually as a as a five but probably on a UK basis only oh yeah I guess if you limit it purely to the UK he is much more well known here than he is on a global stage but at the same time I also feel like if Alan Sugar wanted to weigh in on the state of the national economy people would listen so I feel like I'd give him six out ten okay I'm not I'm not sure now that Alan Sugar you know if you if the prime minister's phone rings that you would make you say I must take that call so I'm going to I'm going to give him a four okay four from you six from me what about legacy this is an interesting one well he brought affordable technology to millions of people the apprentice is a much loved show and people will know that and people will still say you're fired whether pointing right you know to me it's become a thing hasn't it so will we still be talking about Alan Sugar in 50 years time I'm guessing no but I think that I'm so three for me well I always I think that you know I think that Lord Sugar's legacy is actually also as a cultural figure like you say you know he's become one of the business figures that you associate in British popular culture yeah it's interesting that he was actually the third choice for television producers after other people turned it down I think he's really kind of made it his own and I don't think you can say that for any other business figure in the UK yeah fair enough and I suppose when we're talking about legacy we should reflect on our listener Alex's original question because this kind of gets to it you know does his blunt old school style represent authentic entrepreneurship or outdated arrogance I like yeah I think the answer is a bit of both isn't it yeah I mean I think I think possibly in the ATC really embodied that swash buckling decade of you can make your own money you don't need to have gone to the right schools or know the right people or you need us a little bit of hustle and grit yeah but you know is that kind of attitude really relevant in the 21st century who knows I give them a three you gave them a three out of ten I'm going to go slightly high and giving them a five out of ten okay all right so the ultimate question is is he good bad or just another billionaire what do you think email good bad billionaire that's all one word at bbc.com or drop us a text or whatsapp to 001 917 686 1176 you can rewind that if you need to hear it again and tell us what you think and don't forget to include your name as we may read out your message on a future episode so we've had some people email in with feedback and we've got one from Pat and Bristol who says she couldn't wait for the return of the podcast so Pat we hope we've enjoyed this first episode back again she says listening to your podcast is like having a bag of your favorite treats to hand impossible not to consume in one sitting so I've listened to them all as they're released and them now having withdrawal symptoms I love listening to everyone you tackle so don't have any suggestions well Pat that's quite a compliment thank you so much Pat her judgement by the way on the brazilian billionaire but your brothers from our last episode is I do believe that the protester brothers are bad but I don't eat meat well thanks for that Pat and we hope you enjoy the new series we also had this email about Stephen Spielberg from philippin Uganda he says I thought Simon's impression of ET was spot on wow yes hi praise hi praise to meet Stephen Spielberg is just another billionaire interesting aside from his incredibly unique movie and business deals he seems to me as another man just trying to make the most out of his life both creatively and financially thanks philipp we appreciate that well Ananya from Mumbai also got in touch about Spielberg and they say Spielberg built a career making the world feel bigger whether it was aliens dinosaurs or distant adventures his films created fictional universes that stayed with people his cultural influences widespread across the globe even here in Mumbai India he showed the world that fiction has economic value and that imagination can be monetized he made money by making people care deeply about something that never existed to me that's what makes this story so unique I must say I agree with Ananya for that you know he made the world seem bigger your imagination seem bigger I remember you know going to see raiders of lost dark when I was 11 years old and the world seemed like a bigger place and you definitely made people care about aliens yeah and not getting the water and we had this email from Dom about the Chinese chili oil billionaire towel hobby hyzing and Simon I just listened to the towel hobby episode and really enjoyed it last year my partner and I took a trip to Guayang China my partner's hometown to meet her mum for the first time we arrived late at night exhausted and took a cab during the ride I fell asleep but was awoken by a strong smell of chili oil it just so happened that we passed one of the Laoghan Mars manufacturing plants on the way half awake I remember thinking tells chili oil is so ubiquitous and seen in almost every household she has to be a billionaire what a surprise to see the title of this episode pop up you're right thank you dom says we're sharing these interesting and unique episodes it's so fascinating to get a glimpse into these billionaires lives and their origins and thank you dom for confirming that yes indeed the chili oil is something you can smell from a distance so who do we have next week a very unusual billionaire in that it's not often that you become that rich working for someone else's company but this person became perhaps the most famous holder of the cheap operating officer title for a company called Metta before that Facebook and before that you worked a little startup called Google yes it is Sheryl Sandberg the lean in founder the ultimate archetypal girl boss herself on the next episode of Good Bad Billinar. 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