Alexey Mordashov
Source of wealth: Steel, investments
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Modules
Biography
Alexey Mordashov is the majority shareholder in steel company Severstal, which he ran as CEO for 19 years before resigning in 2015.
Hit by sanctions in 2022, he immediately transferred ownership of key assets, including shares of leisure company TUI and mining outfit Nordgold.
Severstal, in which he still has a 77% stake, lost more than $400 million in 2022 due to Western sanctions, according to Mordashov.
Severstal sold off two U.S. steel plants in 2014, withdrawing from the market at a time of rising tensions between Russia and the West, and turned its focus to its domestic business.
The son of mill workers, Mordashov rose to become the finance director of a steel mill.
When the plant's elderly director instructed him to acquire shares to keep them from an outsider, Mordashov kept most of them for himself.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Alexey Mordashov
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 Alexey Mordashov, linked to Metals & Mining and 'Steel, investments', 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 254 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 16.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.