The thing is, you need to remember that in France, you can't talk about personal fortune/money without raising public outrage. We have an extremely special relationship with money, it is absolutely
taboo to talk about how much money you make or have, and not only in public, in private too, one has to make amends when they reveal that they earn more than the minimal or (god forbids!) average wage.
Likewise, comparative advertising is illegal in France. You can't be the French Coca-Cola and feature the French Pepsi in your ads.
Anyway, let's drop the troll word. I have more quotes to provide though, maybe these will better carry the reputation of "Troublemaker".
Couple recent quotes from Niel (taken from LeWeb 2011) http://www.techrevolutions.fr/free-mobile-le-troll-de-xavier...
"The thing that surprises me is that our concurrents have done nothing yet. They micro-reduced their prices by a few percents, this isn't reasonable! They have to get at it for real, they have to lower the prices for real! Start to cut right now, before we arrive! (...) Ready your communication, build some aggressive marketing plans, then maybe you have a chance to keep on existing! Right now it's a joke, you didn't lower your prices! This isn't serious!"
"I invite you to go and visit their work places, their desks, their lifestyle, look at the leaders of these companies all with their car with driver. As for me I have my cab waiting for me outside! When they no longer have all that, management in these companies will begin to improve!"
2010, from http://frenchweb.fr/xavier-niel-il-etait-une-fois-la-revolut...
"We're so far ahead of the rest that they should be ashamed."
Around 7:12-7:45 in the linked video:
"This struck me as a lack of courage, I had hoped they would, at last, offer unlimited phone calls from their box. [smiles ironically] But you see, we have to deal with copycats who don't go all the way with their copying philosophy. And that's it... actors who are bad, and who even when they copy become bad because they stop copying as soon as there's something good, I personally find it very disappointing. I believe that we're in a market that has always copied us, so companies need to be brave and copy us all the way."
About Orange:
"We have a relationship of tenderness with Orange." (I'm not sure it translates the right way: he implies a relationship that's akin to a kid and his grandmother)
Illustration of his audacity & engineering background, and, well, ethics: in 1996, he launches a minitel service that would become extremely profitable (while not being related to porn): a Reverse Phone Number Lookup directory. At that time France Telecom provided a phone directory to everyone, with the first 3 minutes of connection being free. He simply wired a hundred minitels and browsed the service 3minutes at a time until he had every single person in France on his own database. There was a public outrage. There was a trial, which ended in 1998. Iliad lost and had to pay 100,000,000 Francs in fines (roughly 15 million euros, which was a lot those days) to France Telecom.
link to the legal report for that case: http://www.legalis.net/spip.php?page=breves-article&id_a...
The rest of my knowledge about Xavier Niel's character comes second-hand and is private, so I won't have much more to add here.
Don't take all this the wrong way though, I like this entrepreneur a lot. He is one of my role models.