Modules
Biography
German Khan, a native of Ukraine, cofounded Alfa Group and LetterOne (Luxembourg), with fellow billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Alexei Kuzmichev.
The college pals have been partners since 1989, when they started commodities trader Alfa-Eco.
He is a cofounder of Alfa Bank, the largest non-state owned bank in Russia, which was hit with U.S. sanctions in April.
Alfa Group's Tyumen Oil company merged with BP's Russian assets in 2003 to form TNK-BP.
After 10 years, the partners sold their 25% stake in TNK-BP for $14 billion.
Fridman, Aven, Khan and Kuzmichev were all sanctioned by the EU and U.K. in February and March 2022; Khan stepped down from LetterOne's board in March.
He moved back to Moscow from London in the Summer of 2022.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of German Khan
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 German Khan, linked to Energy and 'Oil, banking, telecom', 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 75 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 4.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.