Oleg Deripaska
Source of wealth: Aluminum, utilities
...
...
Modules
Biography
Oleg Deripaska is the founder of Basic Element, a Russian industrial group with interests in aluminum, energy, construction, agriculture and more.
In April 2018, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions against Deripaska and some of his companies.
In 2000, he merged his Siberian Aluminum with the aluminum assets of Roman Abramovich's Millhouse Capital to form UC Rusal.
In January 2019, OFAC lifted sanctions on En+ Group, UC Rusal and Eurosibenergo, and Deripaska agreed to permanently reduce his stake to 44.95%.
He was the richest person in Russia and the 9th richest in the world in 2008 before nearly losing it all due to crashing markets and heavy debts.
In an IPO in November 2017, En+ Group, which combined Deripaka's stake in UC Rusal and assets in the electric power industry, raised $1.5 billion.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Oleg Deripaska
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 Oleg Deripaska, linked to Metals & Mining and 'Aluminum, utilities', 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 51 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 3.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.