Viktor Vekselberg
Source of wealth: Metals, investments
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Modules
Biography
Viktor Vekselberg, a Ukrainian-born aluminum baron, made his first million selling scrap copper from worn-out cables.
He later bought several medium-size aluminum smelters and bauxite mines and united them into Sual Holding in 1996.
Eleven years later, he merged it with billionaire Oleg Deripaska's Russian Aluminum to form UC Rusal. Both were sanctioned by the U.S. in April 2018.
A partner of billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Len Blavatnik in oil company TNK-BP, he sold his stake in 2013 to state-owned Rosneft for $7 billion.
Because of the sanctions, $1.5 billion he had in U.S. and Swiss banks are frozen.
Vekselberg's superyacht Tango was seized by Spanish police and the FBI in Palma de Mallorca in April 2022.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Viktor Vekselberg
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 Viktor Vekselberg, linked to Diversified and 'Metals, 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.