Igor Bukhman
Source of wealth: Online games
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Modules
Biography
Igor Bukhman and his brother Dmitry own online gaming upstart Playrix.
The company is best known for free mobile-app games such as Homescapes and Fishdom.
Born and raised in northern Russia, the brothers started selling games online while Dmitry was still in high school.
Playrix now does more than $2.5 billion in estimated annual revenue.
In 2018, the Bukhman brothers acquired a stake in video and social network games developer Nexters Global.
Playrix closed its office in Russia in 2022 and relocated almost all of its 1,500 Russian employees.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Igor Bukhman
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 Igor Bukhman, linked to Media & Entertainment and 'Online games', 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 96 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 6.1 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.