Guy Laliberte, Cirque du Soleil co-founder

Circus impresarios have a reputation as hucksters who could talk the hind legs off a donkey and turn the resulting biped into a paying attraction. "Every crowd has a silver lining," the 19th-century showman PT Barnum once said.

His modern-day heir is Guy Laliberte, leader of Cirque du Soleil, the fantastically successful contemporary circus franchise. Not even the great Barnum could match Mr Laliberte's capacity for making money. A former busker, he became one of Canada's richest men and the world's first billionaire fire-breather and stilt-walker. His employees call him the "roi soleil".

Now the sun king is richer still, following last week's sale of his majority stake in the company to US, Chinese and Canadian investors in a deal that values it at $1.5bn. Mr Laliberte is now at liberty to pursue his interests in high-stakes poker, space travel and philanthropy. But will Cirque's new owners come to be haunted by another saying associated with Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute"?

Mr Laliberte was born into a middle-class family in Quebec City in 1959. His upbringing was comfortable, with a father who worked in public relations. An interest in circus life was triggered by a childhood trip to see the US big-top troupe descended from Barnum's original "Greatest Show on Earth". He read Barnum's biography and as a teenager set off for Europe to learn to be a street entertainer.

Cirque du Soleil was founded in Quebec in 1984 by Mr Laliberte and a fellow busker, Gilles Ste-Croix. The model was the so-called "new circus" that began to be developed in the 1970s. There would be no animals jumping through hoops or clamping their jaws around some daredevil's head. Instead, an exotic medley of jugglers, acrobats and clowns bridged the gap between circus and theatre, a kind of death-defying commedia dell'arte. It was not an immediate hit. On the first night the vast yellow-and-blue tent collapsed.

Mr Laliberte ascribes his rise to a gambler's boldness. "It was only with the courage and arrogance of youth that we survived," he has said. Government grants and a substantial overdraft from a Quebec community bank also helped.

Cirque du Soleil has gone on to become one of the biggest brands in show business. It has 19 productions globally, with eight in Las Vegas alone. The company sells 11m tickets worldwide annually, more than all Broadway shows combined, while turnover in 2013 was $750m (down from $1bn in 2012).

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Mr Laliberte's artistic innovation was to modernise circus for an audience weaned on Hollywood blockbusters, video games and stadium rock. Cirque shows feature bombastic live music and gaudy costumes. Plots tell of whimsical dream worlds (Quidam) or the evolution of humanity (Totem), unfolding amid lavish sets and elucidated by dazzlingly choreographed stunts.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the successes mounted up. But in recent years the company's tent has sagged, with falling revenues and productions closing early. The decline can be traced to Mr Laliberte's attempt in 2009 to crack Broadway with a show called, ominously, Banana Shpeel. He duly slipped up. The acrobatic razzle-dazzle, transferred from the usual big tent, fell flat under a proscenium arch. Meanwhile, Mr Laliberte was guilty of absenteeism on a baroque scale, having paid a reputed $35m to orbit the Earth in 2009 as a space tourist in the International Space Station. He wore a clown's red nose during the rocket journey.

Although hard-working and fiercely ambitious, Mr Laliberte has interests outside the Cirque machine. He plays big-money poker tournaments, the game of bluffers and fools, and also supports the nobler practice of philanthropy. He has pledged $100m of his fortune to One Drop , a charity he founded in 2007 to provide communities with access to water and sanitation.

PT Barnum loved hoaxes and charlatanism. In contrast, Mr Laliberte is a circus impresario for a more driven age. He speaks in the language of a positive-thinking, inspirational guru. "We're happiness merchants," he once said, "giving people the opportunity to dream like children."

His advice to budding entrepreneurs, meanwhile, is to "trust the young" and "build humanitarian aid into the business model". Barnum must be spinning in his grave.

Many of Cirque's 4,000 employees are in Montreal. There are concerns in Canada that the new owners may move elsewhere, taking one of the nation's leading cultural exports with them.

Critics complain that Mr Laliberte has oversaturated the market, but the successes have not dried up. One of Cirque's highest-earning shows, Michael Jackson ONE, a tribute to the pop star, launched in 2013. More hits may well be in the production line.

Circus is one of the oldest performing arts. For thousands of years people have gawped at jugglers, ropedancers and fire-eaters. Mr Laliberte may no longer feel impelled to find the silver lining in the crowds that flock to such spectacles. But they will continue flocking to them.

The writer is the FT's pop critic

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