Thierry Breton
Based on Wikipedia: Thierry Breton
On December 23rd, 2025, the Trump administration did something almost unprecedented: it sanctioned a former European Union commissioner. Thierry Breton, the French businessman and politician who had masterminded Europe's sweeping regulations on American tech giants, found his assets frozen and himself banned from entering the United States. The charge? What the administration called "censorship" and "coercion" of American social media platforms.
It was a remarkable turn of events for a man who had spent his career ricocheting between the highest levels of French business and European politics—and it illuminated just how seriously the transatlantic tech war had escalated.
The Turnaround Artist
Before Breton became a thorn in Silicon Valley's side, he was something else entirely: a corporate firefighter with an uncanny ability to rescue drowning companies.
Born in Paris in 1955, Breton trained as an electrical engineer before stumbling into an unusual first job. As part of his mandatory military service—France still required it then—he taught information technology and mathematics at the French high school in New York City. It was 1979, the dawn of the personal computer age, and the young engineer was teaching kids about a technology that would reshape the world.
Two years later, he started his own software company. By 1986, he'd caught the attention of the French government, which brought him in to help design Futuroscope—a science and technology theme park that still operates today, drawing over a million visitors annually to see attractions built around the future that Breton once helped imagine.
But his real talent emerged in 1993, when France faced an embarrassing problem: Groupe Bull, the country's flagship computer manufacturer, was teetering toward bankruptcy. The government called in Breton as second-in-command to save it. He restructured the company ruthlessly, and by 1996 he had pulled Bull back from the brink. The French press started calling him a "turnaround whiz."
The nickname stuck for good reason. His next rescue was even more dramatic.
The Thomson Miracle
In 1997, Thomson Multimedia was a disaster. The state-owned consumer electronics company was hemorrhaging money so badly that Prime Minister Alain Juppé had tried to sell it to the Korean conglomerate Daewoo for a single franc—one euro, essentially nothing. The deal fell through, leaving France with a corporate corpse it couldn't unload.
Breton saw something different. Consumer electronics, he reasoned, was a brutally competitive, low-margin business. Televisions and VCRs would never generate consistent profits. But digital services? Interactive television? The nascent internet? Those were the future.
He diversified aggressively. Thomson started building televisions with built-in software. It got into digital film editing. It partnered with Microsoft, Alcatel, and DirecTV. Investors who had written off the company started paying attention again.
By 1999, Thomson was generating $230 million in profit on $6.5 billion in sales. When Breton left in 2002, revenues had grown by more than 80 percent, and Thomson was outperforming Sony, Matsushita, and Philips—the giants of consumer electronics. The single-franc company had become a global contender.
Saving France Télécom
Then came the biggest challenge of all.
France Télécom—the national telecommunications monopoly turned publicly traded company—had made a series of catastrophic bets at the height of the dot-com bubble. It had bought the British mobile operator Orange, the data carrier Equant, and the internet service provider Freeserve. It had paid billions for third-generation mobile licenses that seemed essential at the time.
When the bubble burst, France Télécom found itself holding the world's most infamous distinction: the most indebted publicly traded company on earth. It owed 60 billion euros—about $54 billion at the time. Its stock had crashed 70 percent in a single year. Shares that had once traded in the twenties were now worth less than seven euros.
Breton took over in October 2002 and immediately launched what he called "Ambition FT 2005." The plan was brutally simple: slash costs, refinance the debt, and raise $16 billion from shareholders. The goal was to shed $30 billion in obligations over three years.
Two months after he arrived, the stock had risen 170 percent.
But Breton wasn't just cutting—he was building. In 2003, he announced a plan to bring broadband internet to 90 percent of France, a wildly ambitious goal at a time when most French households still used dial-up modems. He increased research spending by 20 percent and pushed the company to file more than 7,000 patents.
In 2004, he launched something called the Livebox—France Télécom's first "triple play" offering, combining internet, television, and telephone service in a single package. It was the kind of integrated service that would later become standard worldwide, but France Télécom was among the first to implement it at scale.
When Breton left for the government in February 2005, the stock price had climbed to 23 euros—more than triple where it had been when he arrived. The company's debt had dropped to 40 billion euros. Years later, the Harvard Business Review would rank him 62nd among the world's 100 best-performing chief executives, based on an academic study of the 2,000 largest global companies.
The Minister Who Said France Was Living Beyond Its Means
In 2005, something unusual happened: the government didn't just call Breton in to fix a company. It called him in to fix the country's finances.
He became France's minister for economy, finance, and industry—the fourth person to hold the job in just one year. The country's public finances were a mess. The deficit had exceeded 3 percent of gross domestic product for three consecutive years, violating the European Union's fiscal rules.
Breton said something that French politicians rarely admitted publicly: the country was living beyond its means. He pointed out that every centime of income tax that French citizens paid went solely to servicing the interest on the national debt—not to schools, not to hospitals, not to roads, just to debt payments.
It was the kind of blunt assessment that echoed Prime Minister Raymond Barre's famous warning from 1976. And like Barre, Breton set about trying to change it.
By the end of 2005, the deficit had fallen to 2.9 percent of gross domestic product—finally below the 3 percent threshold. By 2006, it had dropped further to 2.5 percent, and the country achieved something it hadn't seen since 1995: a primary budget surplus, meaning the government was taking in more than it spent, excluding interest payments.
Breton also pushed through reforms to simplify the tax code, reducing the number of tax brackets from seven to four and introducing internet-based tax filing. He promoted the concept of a "tax shield," capping total taxation at 60 percent of income—a controversial idea that his successor Nicolas Sarkozy would later expand.
Perhaps most unusually, he tried to get France to think about its "immaterial heritage"—the intangible assets the state owned, like brand names, images, and intellectual property. He commissioned a study and set up an agency to manage these assets. By 2010, the state had valued its immaterial heritage at 10 billion euros.
When Breton left office in May 2007, unemployment had fallen to 8.4 percent, the lowest since 1983.
The Atos Years
After a stint teaching at Harvard Business School, Breton returned to the corporate world in 2008, taking over Atos, a French information technology company. It was another turnaround job—the company was profitable but underperforming its competitors, managed in what Breton called an overly "compartmentalized" way.
He embarked on an acquisition spree that would transform the company. In 2011, he bought Siemens's entire IT services division, instantly making Atos the largest IT services company in Europe and one of the five largest in the world. The deal, valued at 850 million euros, was the biggest Franco-German corporate transaction since Daimler and Renault had partnered earlier that year.
In 2014, he acquired Bull—the same company he had rescued two decades earlier—turning Atos into a major player in supercomputing and cybersecurity. Later that year, he bought Xerox's IT outsourcing business.
By 2015, Atos's market value had grown by more than 5 billion euros. Its stock price had risen 268 percent in five years.
Breton also made headlines for a quixotic crusade: banning internal email. In a 2011 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he called email "the pollution of the information age" and announced plans to eliminate it at Atos within 18 months, replacing it with enterprise social networks and instant messaging. The "zero email" strategy generated enormous publicity, though whether it ever fully succeeded remained debatable.
The Man Who Took on Big Tech
In 2019, President Emmanuel Macron nominated Breton to the European Commission, where he would oversee the internal market—essentially, the rules governing commerce across the 27-nation bloc.
It was a controversial appointment. The anti-corruption organization Anticor warned that Breton's previous positions at France Télécom and Atos created serious risks of conflicts of interest. He would be regulating industries where he had deep personal and financial ties.
But Breton took the job and quickly became one of the most visible commissioners in Brussels. He promoted what he called a "strong line" against abuses by major digital platforms—which in practice meant taking on American tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and especially Twitter.
The centerpiece of his work was the Digital Services Act, a sweeping law that required large platforms to police illegal content, provide transparency about their algorithms, and submit to European oversight. For American tech executives accustomed to light regulation at home, it was a dramatic assertion of European power.
Breton was also an outspoken critic of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The tension came to a head in September 2024, when Breton resigned with immediate effect, accusing von der Leyen of blocking his renomination. He had expected to serve a second term; instead, he found himself pushed out.
The Sanctions
Three months later, on December 23rd, 2025, the Trump administration struck back.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against Breton, the architect of the Digital Services Act that had forced American platforms to change how they operated in Europe. Breton's American assets were frozen. He was declared persona non grata—forbidden from entering the United States.
The stated reason was "censorship" and "coercion" of American social media companies. To Breton's defenders, it was retaliation for Europe daring to regulate Silicon Valley. To his critics, it was overdue accountability for what they saw as European overreach.
Either way, it marked an extraordinary escalation in the transatlantic conflict over technology regulation—and it made Thierry Breton, the turnaround artist who had spent decades rescuing French companies, into something new: a symbol of the growing divide between American and European visions of how the internet should work.
The Writer
Throughout all of this, Breton maintained another career that rarely made headlines: he wrote science fiction novels. The French businessman who had saved multiple companies, served as finance minister, and challenged American tech giants also found time to publish speculative fiction about technology and its consequences.
It was perhaps fitting. Breton had spent his life at the intersection of technology and power—teaching computer science in New York as a young man, building software companies, rescuing hardware manufacturers, bringing broadband to rural France, and ultimately trying to shape how billions of people experienced the internet. Whether he was a visionary or a villain depended largely on which side of the Atlantic you stood.
But no one could deny that he had seen the future coming—and had spent forty years trying to bend it in directions he thought were right.