Bolivian tech titan with a $1bn bet on a UK university
At 6ft 6in, I reckon Marcelo Claure must be about the tallest man in Bolivia, a country where the average adult male is just 5ft 5in. “I think I am,” he says, poker-faced. I laugh; he looks confused.
“No, truly,” he adds. “Not a joke. I think I am the tallest living Bolivian.”
He is also, I note, the richest living Bolivian. “Probably,” answers Claure, 55, one of the world’s foremost technology business leaders. He has an estimated fortune of $2.3 billion (£1.7 billion).
He made his name as second-in-command to Masayoshi Son at the Japanese investment giant SoftBank. There, he earned turnaround-guru status and the moniker “Mr Fixit”. But, the story goes, he left SoftBank when Son refused to pay him $2 billion. “Like good friends, we came to good terms,” says Claure coolly.
Today, his investment companies hold stakes in more than 200 firms; he serves as vice-chairman of Shein, the Chinese outfit that has redefined fast-fashion; and he co-owns three big forces in global football.
But on the day I meet him, he’s wearing a different hat. It’s dark blue, it’s frilly and it has a tassel dangling at its side.
Claure has just finished hosting a ceremony for graduates of Arden University, a private British institution in which his private equity firm recently paid $1 billion for a 50 per cent stake. The seller, and Claure’s new partner, was Global University Systems, a higher education business led by London-based entrepreneur Aaron Etingen.
I’m sitting opposite Claure, hat and gown removed to reveal a sharp blue suit, at a large oak table in the wood-panelled President’s Room of Central Hall Westminster, a grand-ish conference centre.
He has been ushered in by a group of advisers and doesn’t seem to know who I am, looking alarmed when I inform him that we’re due to speak for 45 minutes.
“45!?” exclaims Claure, who has retained a Latino twang through decades living in the US. Still, he exudes a personable, strongman-type charm that has helped him through his career.
You might not have heard of Arden, a ten-year-old, no-frills, Coventry-based institution that provides degrees in business, criminology and computing.
Most of its students are British, based in office block-style “campuses” across the UK; many are completing degrees in their thirties while juggling jobs and kids.
Arden also has a growing contingent of international students who log in to lectures remotely, enabling them to gain a British degree from home.
We can design classes based on a pupil’s own needs
Despite some off-putting reviews on the online forum Reddit, where some anonymous posters warn of chaotic classrooms and a conveyor-belt atmosphere, Arden is growing fast: it has 45,000 students, up from fewer than 10,000 in 2020 — and it has made strides in student satisfaction scores.
As a business, it looks healthy. While many UK universities are struggling to cover their costs, Arden, which keeps real estate and academic research costs to a minimum, made a profit of £59 million in 2024 on revenues of £189 million.
Claure has ambitions for Arden to be a university of the future. “Traditional institutions take a long time to modify the way they teach,” he says. “We’ve been educating people the same way for the last few hundred years,” adds Arden’s new chairman.
His vision is to use artificial intelligence to enhance the way students learn, including through the use of “AI tutors”.
These tools would supplement human teachers and create “micro-personalised education — educating people based on their needs, based on their skills”.
If you’ve ever tried out a program such as Google’s NotebookLM — which can condense text and quickly generate podcasts, slide decks, flash cards and quizzes — it’s easy to envisage how new tech, if affordable, could transform education.
Then there’s language. Claure believes that fast-evolving translation technologies mean that soon a lecturer’s voice could be translated instantly into any language.
“The big barrier to online education … has always been that we were limited to giving classes to people in English,” he says. “That’s over. You’ll be able to give a class in Spanish, Chinese, Greek, English, and then the person on the receiving end will decide what language they want to receive it in.” Just think, he adds: “There might not be a need to learn English any more.”
This could be a boon to Arden, which hopes to build up its roster of remote international students by taking on people who want to gain a UK degree without leaving home. But the mission is also personal: to give Claure credit where it’s due, he does clearly have a passion for education and social mobility. “Education is the foundation of who I am,” he says.
His diplomat father and mother “spent their entire lifetime savings in order to educate” their three children. Claure, born in Guatemala but raised in Bolivia, was educated in the capital city of La Paz and then — after being turned down by Harvard — Bentley University, a private institution in Massachusetts.
“When you come from a country like Bolivia, that is a big deal.”
Claure says he started out as “the poorest kid in my university”. He fixed this by delivering pizzas and then by devising a scheme to buy frequent-flying points and sell them on at a higher price. Aged 22, on a plane home to Bolivia, he met the president of the Bolivian Football Federation and landed a job as his head of business operations before the 1994 World Cup in the US. “We hit it off,” Claure explains.
The federation was “broke”. Claure’s solution was to over-order on match tickets in advance and sell them on at a higher price. “We set up shop in the US, sold those tickets, grabbed that money and used it to finance the team to train.”
He moved to Miami and went on to make millions by founding Brightstar Corp, which distributed mobile phones to Latin America, and then billions when SoftBank bought his business in 2013.
After selling out to Son, Claure joined SoftBank and was sent to rescue its investment in Sprint, a large US mobile network provider. As chief executive and later executive chair of Sprint, he stemmed losses and drove up the share price before striking a $26 billion sale to T-Mobile in 2018.
He later moved to Tokyo, as Son’s chief operating officer. “Working with him from 8am to 11pm every day for a couple of years was just a fascinating experience,” he says.
In 2019, Son dispatched Claure to recover his investment in WeWork, the co-working giant that had plunged into chaos and dropped a plan to list after being been valued at $47 billion. As executive chairman, Claure stabilised the business, cut costs and helped it to list on the New York Stock Exchange. But a longterm recovery was not achieved: WeWork filed for bankruptcy in late 2023, nearly two years after Claure left.
When I ask Claure why he left SoftBank in 2022, he says: “I’d done everything ... We did the famous Sprint turnaround; we did the merger with T-Mobile that created the world’s most valuable telecommunications company; I ran all of SoftBank; I ran WeWork while I was running Soft- Bank; and it came at a time where I felt there was nothing else.
“I always say that every Sunday night, you need to feel eager to work on Monday — and I’d lost that.”
When I ask if it’s true he left because Son refused to pay him $2 billion, the stony response comes: “No.” After a pause, he adds: “I had an employment contract that said that was owed to me. I didn’t leave because of that. When I left, I wanted to collect that. But Masa had a different view.”
Claure reassures me Son remains a friend. And he says he’s had “a lot of fun” since leaving SoftBank. He makes dozens of investments a year through a family office, Claure Group, and he co-chairs private equity outfit Brightstar Capital Partners, which acquired Brightstar Corp in 2020 and 50 per cent of Arden last year. He is also vice-chair of Shein, which he says it is “one of the most advanced technology companies in the world”.
Then there is football. Claure has co-owned his nation’s biggest team, Club Bolivar, since 2008. In 2018, he also founded the Major League Soccer team Inter Miami with Sir David Beckham, a friend he first met at a dinner party hosted by the singer and actress Jennifer Lopez. He sold out of Inter Miami in 2021 but returned to the MLS three years later when he bought a 10 per cent stake in New York City FC from City Football Group, whose biggest club is Manchester City. Claure was already a co-owner of Spain’s Girona FC with City Football Group.
While the MLS remains a minnow when compared with England’s Premier League, Claure is betting that America’s soccer tournament will make up ground.
“Americans love football,” he says.
“There’s more people watching the Premier League, by many times, in the United States than from England. So now, we’ve just got to elevate the quality of the sport in the US and we’ll get there.”
Away from football, Claure is a tech man through and through. It’s difficult to not be infected by his enthusiasm and easy to see how this master networker is able to win over celebrity friends and wealthy investors.
He claims not to own a car — “I take Ubers!” — and says he prefers robo-vehicles to human drivers for safety reasons.
He thinks there’s a credible argument to suggest that the world will soon be so “efficient” that humans need to work only two days a week. And as for cancer? “A cure is close,” predicts Claure, who reckons “most kids born today will live for more than 100 years”.
As he is escorted away by his minders, he tells me with a grin: “I don’t think there has ever been a more exciting time to be alive.”
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