During the summer in Ibiza, Yann Pissenem finishes work around 8 a.m. As the owner of the three biggest nightclubs on the Spanish island, he likes to oversee his dominion in person until sunrise. Then he drives to his villa above the Balearic Sea. His property isn’t visible from the road, and his driveway cuts through 10 acres of private forest. After he checks on the 70 species of cacti he breeds, he takes a walk among his hundreds of ficus and kiri trees. Pissenem doesn’t look like a naturalist—“If I don’t smile,” he says, smiling, “I look a bit like a gangster”—but he sometimes hugs the trees. “For me,” he says, “it’s better than a human.”

Pissenem is a nightclub magnate who chooses not to enjoy most of what he sells. He designs his venues for Champagne showers and sunrises on ecstasy, but he doesn’t drink or take pills. His restaurants serve Wagyu loin and Poget oysters with caviar, but he lives off custom nutritional pellets designed by a Swiss doctor. And although his clubs and his villa overlook the Balearic, he often doesn’t sleep in a room with a view. During the six-month nightclub season, the 52-year-old Frenchman lives in a garage apartment away from his wife and children in the main house. Some nights he sleeps for three hours in a dark room next to his gym, and on others he uses his cryotherapy chamber.

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“To succeed in this world, I can’t touch the things that are really accessible,” Pissenem says. “I’ve seen a lot of good club owners fall. You have girls, any girls you want, you have drugs, any drug you want, and then you have alcohol, as much as you want. And before you notice, you’ve lost. It’s over. You’re not gonna control the business in an industrial way.”

Islands don’t have C-suites, but Pissenem is the closest thing Ibiza has to a CEO. Since 2017, he and his silent partners have owned its two biggest venues, Ushuaïa and Hï, and they reportedly gross around 200 million euros each season. In 2025, he added [UNVRS] (pronounced “universe”) Ibiza, the largest nightclub in the world. Together, his three superclubs dictate the rhythm of the island and the schedules of the industry’s top DJs, and his Instagram shows him smiling with Cristiano Ronaldo and Jeff Bezos.

“He’s almost like the president of Ibiza,” John Summit, the rare American DJ with a residency at [UNVRS], says. “Seeing him at night is like watching Obama stopping by, smiling, giving a handshake to everyone.”

When Pissenem arrived on the island as a former busboy in 2008, electronic dance music was a niche business. The genre had a smaller US market share than jazz or classical. But thanks to Pissenem and others, DJ culture has scaled. House and techno are bigger on TikTok and Instagram than rock music, and Coachella was 45 percent DJs this year. The industry has been valued as high as $15 billion, and its top acts charge seven figures a night. In Ibiza, the dance music capital, Pissenem is the face of this change.

“There are designers and followers in this world, and Yann is a designer,” says the French DJ Hugel, a resident at Hï. “He had the vision that Ibiza could become more than a rave island. It could become the touristic VIP rave island, which is the same thing, but it costs like 10 times the price.”

When I first visited Ibiza last summer, the airport was lined with ads for Pissenem’s clubs. New arrivals walked under DJs’ faces: David Guetta, Calvin Harris, Black Coffee, Anyma, Martin Garrix, FISHER, Armin van Buuren, Summit, Carl Cox, and others of Pissenem’s weekly resident acts. (Combined, his 30-odd residents have nearly 100 million Instagram followers.) Next to the baggage claim, Pissenem’s chauffeurs held up iPhones for the visiting DJs who’d flown commercial.

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Many Americans think of Ibiza as a foam party from the minute you leave the airport, but the truth is more seductive. The island is mostly green space, and it feels like a summer camp of hills and coves. To get to [UNVRS], I drove through a residential neighborhood and smelled Aleppo pines. I followed one of Pissenem’s trucks spraying water on a dirt road, and I parked by a giant sculpture of a shipwrecked UFO.

[UNVRS]’s white adobe-style walls stretched in all directions. The night didn’t start for five hours, but a dozen guys with violent calves walked out of the club. They looked like a professional soccer team, and I assumed they’d just finished a tour of the grounds. Then a dozen women passed by with the imperial boredom of models off duty, and I wondered if they’d come with the La Liga players. After that, professionally athletic men and professionally beautiful women kept streaming out until there were 40 or 50 of each. When Pissenem’s assistant, Karla Michaell, arrived, she told me I’d come during a fire drill, and the crowd was security guards and hostesses for the club.

Then a black G-Wagon parted the crowd. A tan Frenchman stepped out in a black T-shirt and gray buzz cut. He looked slighter than his security guards but no less built for combat, and he walked through the fire drill with italicized momentum. Because of his Instagram posts with Leonardo DiCaprio and Drake, I expected a loud nightlife kingpin type, but Pissenem introduced himself in quiet, precise English. Summit says Pissenem made a similar first impression on him: “I thought Yann was going to be this huge, bombastic figure taking over the room, but he has this incredibly calm demeanor. And I think you have to be like that, because the nightlife can just eat you alive.”

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Pissenem used a wristband to open a metal door. We climbed a back staircase, and I asked him about the army of guards outside. He explained that he owns a private security company that services his clubs and villas around the island. He said the guards are his friends, and he spars in jujitsu with some of them for 90 minutes a day.

We entered a room with a table and some office supply furniture. Pissenem had spent at least 80 million euros building [UNVRS] on the grounds of the old superclubs Privilege and Ku, but he’d clearly saved on his own office. He sat behind the only decoration in the space, a nameplate that read “Manager of the Universe.”

When I sat down, I told Pissenem that I’d learned about him after his viral stunt to launch [UNVRS]. He folded his hands to tell the story of the marketing campaign. Even before [UNVRS], Pissenem’s clubs had outmuscled many of the superclubs on the island, but he felt a special rivalry with Pacha. The downtown club has helped define Balearic glamour for more than five decades, and its cherry logo is known worldwide. (I’ve seen Pacha cherry bumper stickers on four continents.) To announce that he was building the world’s largest nightclub six miles from Pacha, Pissenem wanted a more iconic logo than his rival’s red fruit.

“Pacha lives because of the cherries,” he tells me. “That iconic cherry logo from the ’70s and ’80s. They live from the merchandise based on the cherries, and they are so famous, these cherries, that people go to the club. And I think it’s not fair, because I think I try to raise the bar every day, yeah?... And so I needed a logo to fight the cherries.”

Pissenem had competed with Pacha since he’d arrived on the island, but he felt new pressure while he built [UNVRS]. The Dubai real estate development and luxury hospitality group FIVE Holdings had bought the Pacha Group for 302.5 million euros in 2023, and its CEO, Kabir Mulchandani, planned to spend hundreds of millions more on expansion. To compete with Pacha, Pissenem wanted an imagotype that worked across cultures and fit the science fiction spirit of the age. After many drafts, his team came up with a flying saucer logo. As the “strawberry on the cake,” Pissenem asked for a global marketing campaign to tease it.

“I was really pushy, and my team came with nothing,” he said. “And so I shout to everybody, ‘Fuck you, I’m gonna do it myself.’ Close the door, yeah? And in three days, I came up with the UFO video.”

Pissenem decided to fake an alien sighting over the Mediterranean. He sent his creative director to film the rocks of Es Vedrà with his iPhone, and he had an FX artist add a spacecraft based on the [UNVRS] logo. After they recorded sound effects in a parking lot, Pissenem had a convincingly homemade video of an orb flying over Ibiza.

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Without telling the rest of his staff about the hoax, Pissenem sent the clip to the island’s tourism accounts. It traveled to dance music meme pages and Guetta’s Instagram, and newspapers from Europe to Pakistan ran headlines like “Tourists Capture Mysterious Light.” Within a month, the clip had more than 50 million views, making it one of the most circulated UFO videos in modern history.

“It was one of the best marketing plans I’ve ever seen in my life,” Guetta tells me. “Any product.”

After a month, Pissenem invited Will Smith to Ibiza to reveal the truth. Smith found Pissenem on the roof of the [UNVRS] construction site holding a drone controller. Talking to the camera, Smith described him as “my boy Yann. Yann is like the king of Ibiza.”

The next time I met Pissenem in his office, he had a busted lip from a jujitsu session. He took a call in Spanish to set the night’s ticket prices and a call in English to discuss whether a new artist would “eat the snake” in a fee negotiation. He stretched his neck and watched a TV feed of the billion-stream Australian DJ FISHER practicing his descent on a harness from [UNVRS]’s 82-foot ceiling. To start our interview, Pissenem opened a graph paper notebook and drew a square.

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The square symbolized his first apartment when he moved to Barcelona at age 18 to study tourism. He’d arrived from the 350-person village of Azelot, France, where his father was the Parti Socialiste mayor and his mother taught English. Pissenem drew larger and larger circles around the square, showing how he walked in increasing loops to learn his new Spanish city. These walks led him to the bars on the Port Olímpic, which had just opened for the 1992 Summer Games. He took a job as a busboy and toilet cleaner, and he practiced carrying a tray of drinks around his apartment until he got a job as a server. He already had experience as a bouncer at home and as a DJ at a summer resort in Peñíscola, and he was promoted to bar manager in Port Olímpic by the end of the school year.

I ask him if he had a sense of where this self-made hustle was leading, and he says, “I didn’t know if I was going to be a big politician, a leader, military, police, whatever kind of thing. But I knew I had the destiny of being something and doing something. My feeling was, ‘I’m invincible, and whatever it is, I’m gonna go for it.’”

Instead of the military, he found Barcelona’s semilegal techno after-parties. After his bar shifts ended at sunrise, he started joining his coworkers at morning raves. He watched security guards, sex workers, and other “professional black belts of nightlife” dance to new rhythms from Detroit and Berlin. The scene was small enough that he wouldn’t have to compete with big business, and soon he decided to throw after-parties of his own. He’d already hosted dances in his home village, and this time he designed a logo with Egyptian gods and recruited a team of acrobats and drag queens. By his early 20s, he’d begun his career as an underground techno promoter.

Pissenem said that throwing these raves convinced him to stop drinking. His parties sometimes ended with gang shootings or police raids, and he wanted an unimpaired eye on his guests and workers. He became sober at age 23, and it gave him a new view of his job. “The beautiful people and drag queens, which are flashy and fully brilliant at 4 a.m. with a bag of pills, you see them at 8 a.m. on the bus, and you realize that what’s shining at night is sometimes really sad.”

Pissenem looks up from the graph paper, which was now full of boxes and lines symbolizing the two dozen bars and clubs he opened around Barcelona. “The night, the night is the night,” he says. “It’s the moment where you don’t really see. But if you are awake, you understand really fast that there’s a big illusion.”

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“There’s a feeling between people in our industry that everybody’s friends, because you hug people, you do shots with people, you do drugs with people, you’re smiling and you’re partying with them,” he says. “And it’s all fake. We are competing. It’s a shark tank, but with drugs, girls, alcohol, and a party in the middle of it.

“But if you are able to see this, you understand that it can be an amazing business. Because, of course, loads, loads, loads, of money can be made in the entertainment business,” he says. “I saw that in the kingdom of blind people, the guy with one eye is the king.”

Ibiza is an island of paradise lost. For the last 100 years, old heads have told new arrivals that they’d just missed the fun. In 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote to a friend that the island had become overrun with tourists and lost its magic. Errol Flynn probably heard the same when he docked his schooner in the 1950s, and the complaint greeted the rich hippies who came to swim nude during the Vietnam War. (The locals called them peluts, “hairy people.”)

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But when Pissenem first visited Ibiza as a guest in the 1990s, it was clear even then that it was a golden decade. A change had started in 1987, when the future British superstar Paul Oakenfold and some friends had taken ecstasy and danced to DJ Alfredo on the Amnesia nightclub terrace. They’d flown home describing an open-air island nightlife that felt like MDMA, and dopamine-poor Brits started booking flights. After the British government cracked down on raves in the early ’90s, Ibiza became Europe’s place to dance to electronic music.

On his first trip to the island, Pissenem found a loosely regulated world of dance parties. Promotion teams competed on the beach to sell tickets to the superclubs—Amnesia, Pacha, Privilege, Space—but also to pop-up raves in coves and hills. A single night might include a live sex show over the indoor pool at Privilege, an Oakenfold set at Amnesia, and a beachside comedown at Cafe del Mar, the birthplace of “chill out” music. At the time, Pissenem didn’t see an opening for his after-parties among the competition. Still, he was struck by what he saw. “When sunrise came, people would dance on the roofs of the cars at the petrol station,” he said. “People were partying in the morning buying croissants.”

“I think of modern Ibiza in three waves,” Oakenfold tells me. “The first was the late ’80s and ’90s. Open-air clubs, electronic music, and Italo disco, that original movement where people were just dancing around. Then came the second wave in the 2000s, with DJ residencies and closed roofs. And now [UNVRS] is the beginning of the third wave.”

During our next interview, Pissenem took a new page of graph paper and drew a skinny rectangle. This one showed the inflatable couch he slept on when he moved to Ibiza in 2008. After a decade of after-party whack-a-mole with the police, he sold most of his belongings and left Barcelona with his dog. When his ferry arrived on the island, his van broke, and a friend had to help push it off the boat. Then, at age 33, he moved into a 215-square-foot apartment with five roommates and two pets. Most mornings, he commuted on foot to build his first minimal techno beach bar.

As a fresh nobody on the island, Pissenem saw a hole in the market. Ibiza is famous for outdoor dance parties, but by the mid-2000s, after-midnight sound ordinances had pushed its superclubs indoors. Pissenem imagined a daytime beach club that catered to older ravers who could afford VIP beds and younger tourists who wanted to dance in the sand. He found a spot on Playa d’en Bossa, far from the island’s main action. He named his venue after Ushuaia, the Patagonian town “at the end of the world,” and added an ï as a marketing flourish.

Ibiza is hostile to new club owners, and Ushuaïa faced the usual onslaught. His landlords shut off his water and electricity, and his rivals called in noise complaints to the police. Pissenem’s investors dropped out after one year, and he spent the winter sleeping on the inflatable couch on the bar floor with his dog. The next summer, though, his club began to own the island’s evening time slot. The minimal techno brought in a college-educated clientele, while the beach-party energy attracted boys and girls in swimsuits, who reportedly attracted Roman Abramovich’s yacht. At the end of his second year, Pissenem scheduled his closing party the same day as the one for legendary after-hours club Space. Some 14,000 people came to dance at his bar, three times Space’s capacity.

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Pissenem’s landlords, the Matutes family, owned Space and a family-friendly hotel next door. Ushuaïa’s noise bled into the hotel buffet, and its parties took customers from Space. The Matutes are known as the “Kennedys of Ibiza” and in the mid-2010s were believed to own a 10th of the island. (A source close to their business believes that number is now higher.) In addition to their global hotel business, the family helped build the island’s first electric plant, its most important shipyard, the main ferry system, its biggest construction company, and the largest bank. The patriarch, Abel Matutes, founded the Fiesta Hotels Group and served as Spain’s foreign minister, and he could easily squash the minimal techno guy on the beach.

Where other club owners might start a GoFundMe to save their underground venue, Pissenem saw a chance to leave the underground. He began to meet with Matutes’s son, Abel Matutes Prats, who wanted to upgrade the family hotels and invest more in dance music. After a few meetings, Pissenem made a PowerPoint describing a hotel/beach club concept that combined the family’s capital and institutional knowledge with Pissenem’s marketing acumen and relationships with DJs. In 2011, instead of shutting him down, the Matutes family hired Pissenem to turn their family hotel into what he calls an “amusement park for adults.”

At Ushuaïa Hotel, Pissenem and the Matutes built a festival-size stage overlooking a 7,000-person crowd and swimming pool. Pissenem recruited his brother Romain, who ran a Parisian “electro theater” in a houseboat on the Seine, to direct the events. They recruited acts with mass appeal and surrounded them with industrial pyrotechnics and 60 VIP tables. Headline DJs like van Buuren, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, and Avicii joined the first outdoor superclub for mainstage “EDM.” The dance floor filled up with kids who’d seen videos of acrobats flying over Guetta on balloons, and the bottle service tables were booked by adults who could afford the VIP minimum spend.

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The result changed the global economics of nightlife. Pissenem built a team that tracked yachts in the harbor and private planes at the airport, and he created an in-house auction system where customers outbid each other for bottle service. Las Vegas took notice, and soon the strip was dotted with “beach clubs” and EDM bottle service temples. (Of course, both sides argue who inspired whom. Noah Tepperberg, cofounder of Tao Group, says, “Check Yann’s passport, you’ll see some stamps from Vegas a year before Ushuaïa opened.”) By 2013, some Las Vegas casinos earned more from DJs than they did from slot machines, and the new profits started a bidding war. In 2005, for instance, Ibiza’s top DJs had charged $30,000 to $50,000 a night. In 2015, they might have charged $500,000. By 2025, a VIP table and a bottle of Champagne could cost $100,000, and some DJs reportedly charged seven figures.

When Pissenem’s rival club Space closed in 2016, the Matutes handed it to him. He gutted and rebuilt it as Hï. He installed a theater with Italian-opera-style VIP booths, a second dance floor with darker lighting, and a “wild corner” dance floor inside an all-gender bathroom. Romain took over the visuals, and DJ Mag named Hï the number one club in the world from 2022 through 2025. (The streak ended when the magazine put [UNVRS] in first place this year.) Ushuaïa and Hï now stood across the street from each other, and Playa d’en Bossa became the anchor point of the new Ibiza.

Many venues struggled to keep up. They now faced EDM mega-spectacles backed by the island’s most powerful family and run by a man who liked jujitsu more than sleep. Ibiza’s lifers protested its fifth-wave gentrification, and its dance floors got sliced up by VIP booths and lit with teens filming content. Visit Ibiza or an underground dance night at Pikes Hotel, and you’ll find people who think Pissenem sacrificed Ibiza’s heart on the altar of bottle service.

During an interview, Pissenem called these critics “melancholy haters.” When I pressed, he said that he doesn’t read Instagram or other comments, and he “wouldn’t suffer from what a person said about me if I wouldn’t listen to advice from that person.”

Still, none of the 35 people I spoke to for this article wanted to talk ill of Pissenem. I tried to find an authoritative hater, but no one wanted to go on the record. As a final attempt, I reached out to Kabir Mulchandani, the billionaire CEO of Dubai’s FIVE Holdings and Pacha. Pissenem “fights the cherries” for Ibiza’s customers and hotel guests, and he even opened Ushuaïa Dubai to battle Mulchandani’s clubs in the UAE. Their DJ bidding wars have cost them each tens of millions of euros, and I thought Mulchandani might want to take a shot at Pissenem. Instead, he invited Pissenem to join our Zoom call.

For our interview, Mulchandani wore a distressed Balenciaga T-shirt, and Pissenem sat in his G-Wagon. I ask Mulchandani why no one would speak on the record against Pissenem, and he says, “Everybody’s scared of the king.”

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“But I will add,” Mulchandani says, “I think the UFO logo did not do to the cherries what he originally had planned.”

“The cherries are still the strongest icon on the island in terms of imagotype,” Pissenem says. “Painfully for me.”

When I returned to Ibiza in October, I shadowed Pissenem while he oversaw his three clubs. Before midnight we arrived at Ushuaïa, where dancers in metallic bug costumes swayed for 7,000 tourists and VIPs. After a 30-minute talk with Romain, who now also designs shows like the Paris Olympics, he walked across the street to Hï. We waited outside for the South African star Black Coffee, who gave Pissenem a hug when he stepped out of a Sprinter van. Security pushed us to the DJ booth while a few thousand phones shot up in the air, and Black Coffee’s set began within 20 seconds.

At 5:45 a.m., Pissenem took his G-Wagon to [UNVRS]. He parked in his cove next to the front doors, and his head of security escorted him through a GA scrum. He moved quickly but stopped to greet VIP tables and their guards. Seventy feet above our heads was a steel rigging grid that can hold 221 tons of screens, robotics, and acrobats, elements that Romain’s team installs each day from scratch.

At 6 a.m., the “world’s first hyperclub” was in full churn. The Spanish DJ Paco Osuna mixed three tracks together while 7,000 bodies stretched out in one long column. The party was thrown by the immersive troupe Elrow, and actors dressed as psychedelic farm animals danced on stilts under 600 kilograms of confetti. Unlike nights I’d seen at [UNVRS] where thousands of people held up their phones for their Reels, Osuna had whipped the arena-size room into a dance floor.

Pissenem stood behind the DJ and looked out at a crowd 25 times the size of his home village. They’d been sweating for six hours, but the club still smelled like a boutique hotel lobby. In addition to [UNVRS]’s greenroom villa, its elevated VIP booths, its Parisian-style VIP lounge where guests have to leave their phones outside, and its smashburger restaurant lit up like a disco and serving 80-euro fried chicken and caviar, Pissenem had designed the club’s scent himself.

I looked up at a 40-foot LED screen over the stage. It seemed like a regular stadium jumbotron, but it’s made of see-through material that reveals whatever is behind it. Around 8 a.m., a garage-style door opens, and the screen becomes a cathedral-size window streaming morning light onto the crowd. Pissenem came up with this idea as a kind of salute to the morning dance parties he’d watched at bakeries and petrol stations during the ’90s.

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“In some places in the world, if you let the sun in, the clubbers are reminded that they’re fucked up at eight in the morning,” Pissenem says. “But daylight is not a scary thing in Ibiza. There’s this freedom of ‘I don’t care. I don’t have to go to work tomorrow, and everybody here is doing the same thing.’ You put on your sunglasses—or not—and you don’t have to hide.”

The last time I visited his office, Pissenem was in the sixth month of his nightclub sleep schedule. His eyes had bags under them, and his face was swollen from training for the Abu Dhabi World Professional Jiu-Jitsu Championship. (He went on to get a silver medal in the 77-kilogram blue belt Master 4 age group.) He used his hands to push himself up from his desk and walked over to a cabinet above his teakettle. He opened it to show me part of his health regimen. It held rows of bottles for ashwagandha, specialized vitamins, glutathione, and half a dozen strains of dietary mushrooms.

I told him something Guetta had said in our interview: “Until I met Yann, I thought I was the hardest working person on the planet. And then I realized I’m only the second hardest working person on the planet, because this guy is a fucking lunatic. Sometimes I get scared for him, because he’s only sleeping three, four hours a day for six months a year.”

“The most incredible thing is I really like to sleep,” Pissenem says. “No sleep is the worst thing for the body; it generates a lot of cortisol, a lot of stress. But I find strength somewhere.”

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He pulled out a bottle of custom nutritional pellets designed by the Swiss doctor who cleans his plasma twice a year. The doctor told Pissenem that he has a special genetic modification that makes his brain operate at higher speeds, and he creates supplements for him based on blood scans and epigenetic testing. Pissenem centers his meals around these pellets, plus special creatine shakes for his workouts, although I did once see him order a fruit plate from the [UNVRS] bottle service menu.

I tell him he reminds me of Silicon Valley CEOs who don’t let their kids have iPhones or Las Vegas CEOs who don’t gamble. “Exactly,” he says.

Near the teakettle, I noticed a decoration I’d missed during our first interviews. It was a coffee table book about Avicii, the stage name of the beloved Swedish DJ Tim Bergling, who killed himself in 2018 at age 28. He’d played a weekly show at Ushuaïa for five years, and Pissenem was there for his last show in August 2016.

“Tim was a genius,” Pissenem says. “I loved him. Sometimes you suffer from people not understanding you, because your brain goes too fast.”

“People try to use you,” he says. “They know there’s a lot of good things that they can grab out of you. They know you generate a lot. But it’s making you tired, yeah? You have a lot to give, because you are a good person, and you generate a lot. You create a lot. You want to give a lot. You have a lot of energy, but people, dark people, bad people, suck that energy. And you can be a DJ, you can be a promoter, you can be a painter, we all have that art thing that people want to absorb and want to win from. And you have to learn how to manage your life and your brain to survive.”

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