Alexander Abramov
Source of wealth: Steel, mining
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Modules
Biography
Alexander Abramov was chairman of steel company Evraz, which is also his biggest holding, until March 2022. He resigned after his partner Roman Abramovich was hit by UK sanctions.
Abramov himself was hit with UK sanctions in November 2022. He has been under sanctions in New Zealand (where he has property) since 2009.
Abramov got his start as the head of a research lab before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1992, he founded a precursor to Evraz Holding and made a fortune exporting metals and coal from the Urals and Siberia.
After the 1998 Russian financial crisis, he bought up hobbled steel companies on the cheap, including two U.S. firms, Claymont Steel and Oregon Steel.
In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded Abramov the Decoration For Beneficence for his public work and charity activity.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Alexander Abramov
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Alexander Abramov, linked to Metals & Mining and 'Steel, mining', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 41 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 2.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.