Modules
Biography
Gleb Fetisov joined Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group in 1995. He later led the group's takeover of an aluminum plant in Siberia.
Fetisov sold all of his business interests in 2014, including a stake in telecom outfit Vimpelcom, for approximately $1.4 billion in cash.
Soon after cashing out, he was arrested and accused of embezzling assets of now-bankrupt My Bank in Moscow.
In February 2015, he paid $200 million to creditors and was soon after released from prison.
He got Cyprus citizenship in June 2022.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Gleb Fetisov
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 Gleb Fetisov, linked to Telecom and '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 10 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 0.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.