Sergey Mikhaylov
Source of wealth: agribusiness
...
...
Modules
Biography
Sergey Mikhaylov inherited his fortune from his father, Igor Babaev, former managing director Cherkizovsky, a formerly state-owned meat-packing plant in Moscow.
Babaev became controlling shareholder of Cherkizovsky during Russia's privatization era in the 1990s, later adding pig and poultry farms, feed mills and other meat-packing plants.
Cherkizovo is now the largest meat producer in Russia, with 360,000 hectares (about 900,000 acres) of agricultural land.
Babaev retired from business in 2015 and gifted the shares to his two sons and ex-wife, who relinquished her shares in 2022.
Mikhaylov had internships with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (USA) in the early 2000s.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Sergey Mikhaylov
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 Sergey Mikhaylov, linked to Food & Beverage and 'agribusiness', 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 7 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 0.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.