John Caudwell remembers the exact moment he became a billionaire. In September 2006, standing at the helm of his yacht Dreamster, anchored off Antibes in the south of France, the founder of Phones 4u watched as £1.46 billion from the sale of his company dropped into his Barclays bank account.
The relief was enormous. “It would have killed me to carry on,” he admits, describing 20-hour days of soul-sapping stress that took him to breaking point. “It had been all of me for so long. I felt I was 80 per cent Phones 4u and 20 per cent me. I thought I would be nothing without it.”
He allowed himself a brief pause, even a few glasses of celebratory champagne, but the man just couldn’t