Roman Abramovich
Source of wealth: Steel, investments
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Modules
Biography
Roman Abramovich, who owns stakes in Russian steel giant Evraz and nickel producer Norilsk Nickel, has been sanctioned by the U.K., EU, Canada, Australia and Switzerland.
His Chelsea FC was sold for nearly $5 billion in May 2022 to a group led by American billionaire Todd Boehly; he didn't get proceeds from the sale.
He sold a 73% stake in Russian oil firm Sibneft to state-owned gas titan Gazprom for $13 billion in 2005.
He spent more than $1 billion in Russia's Far East Chukotka region, where he was governor (reportedly at Putin's behest) from 2000 to 2008.
After his British investor visa expired in 2018, he became an Israeli citizen and, in 2021, a Portuguese citizen.
He acted as a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow whe the war started. He helped hundreds of war prisoners, including 10 foreigners, return home.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Roman Abramovich
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 Roman Abramovich, linked to Diversified and 'Steel, 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 66 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 4.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.