For less than a minute, the president of a bank with almost a hundred billion capitalization spoke like a salesperson from one of its branches. Next to him, the owner of the largest supermarket chain in Spain was waiting for his turn to introduce himself. He streamer The one they were addressing, and which broadcast the match live, is IShowSpeed, with 57 million followers on YouTube. And I had no idea who these gentlemen were.
What happened. On the night of July 14, Spain beat France 2-0 and sealed its place in the final of the 2026 World Cup. Among the VIP audience, along with Timothée Chalamet, Javier Bardem and Usain Bolt, were Ana Botín, president of Banco Santander, and Juan Roig, president of Mercadona. They both went to greet Darren Watkins Jr., the streamer known as IShowSpeed, which broadcast the game live. The exchange began with introductions. “It’s like the Walmart of Spain,” they explain pointing to Roig in reference to Mercadona. Botín was not far behind: he defined his bank as “the JPMorgan of Europe.”
A few seconds later the commercial offer arrived: “You have to open an account at Openbank”, and ended with a sales pitch which surely captivated Speed: “We pay you 4% for your savings.” The young man managed to tell Botín that he would have to give him “a good credit rating”, but he responded between surprise, curiosity and pure stupefaction.
Who is Speed? At just 21 years old, Watkins Jr, or IShowSpeed, has accumulated more than 57 million subscribers on YouTube, and more than 150 million followers across all of his networks. He has been broadcasting live from the stands for weeks at the 2026 World Cup, after his favorite team, Portugal, was eliminated in the quarterfinals. On the night of July 14, the Spain-France match, its live broadcast from the AT&T Stadium reached nearly 58 million connected accounts. That’s why it was Roig and Botín who approached him, and not the other way around. No conventional advertising campaign would have put them in front of a comparable audience, much less that profile: young, digital and absent from traditional channels.
Who are the other people? The older ones, we say. We know this very well, but it doesn’t hurt to remember it, because it is their insane fortunes that turn this talk in the box into a piece of Celtiberian memorabilia to take into account. Booty has a personal assets of 350 million euros (Santander has a market capitalization that has touched 100 billion euros this year). A considerable fortune, but far from the 8.8 billion that Forbes attributes to Roig in his latest list of the greatest Spanish fortunes.
Rich folks. Throughout the conversation, Roig does not utter a single sentence in English. It is his companions who present it, who seek the comparison with Walmart and act as interpreters. It is a very particular and very Spanish folksiness, which leads Botín to compare Mercadona and Santander with giant American businesses. And it’s not because they lack size or importance, but they find a very simple way to make themselves understood with Speed.
Recent rich. This folksiness comes from the fact that Spanish wealth is not the inheritance of several generations of nobles. Mercadona was already born in democracy, when Roig bought Mercadona from his father along with his brothers and his wife, when the chain had eight stores; today exceeds 1,700 and employs nearly 110,000 people; Botín presides over a bank founded by his family in which he maintains a relevant but purely management position. But the type of wealth they represent does fit with a broader and documented pattern of how the Spanish business class was formed: at the death of Franco, two hundred families controlled more than a third of the shares of the country’s large companies and banks, a network of power very close to the State.
It is not the aristocracy that endures in the United Kingdom or the United States, the famous old money that goes back generations in the past. In Spain we have rich people from powerful but self-made families, which explains this attitude that leads a multimillionaire to calmly sell the advantageous conditions of an account in her bank: the money has been inherited, but not from generations, they are provincial families with power, and hence the attitude towards the young influencerwhich they see as another possibility to make money. Even with the rich, Spain is different.
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