Arkady Volozh
Source of wealth: Search engine
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Modules
Biography
Arkady Volozh cofounded Yandex, a tech company best known for its search engine, which was renamed Nebius Group in 2024.
In 2024 the company sold its Russian assets to local investors in a deal worth $5.4 billion; it still retains its core business in A.I.-centric cloud services and now trades on the Nasdaq.
He cofounded the business with Ilya Segalovich who died of cancer in 2013.
Volozh started working on search in 1989, which led to him establishing Arkadia Company in 1990, a company that developed search software.
His early achievements include the development of electronic search for use in patents, Russian classical literature and the Bible.
Volozh resigned as CEO and executive director of Yandex after the EU sanctioned him personally in June 2022; the sanction was lifted in 2024.
He has resided in Israel since 2014 and is an Israeli citizen.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Arkady Volozh
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 Arkady Volozh, linked to Technology and 'Search engine', 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 64 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 4.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.