Taylor Swift is now a billionaire. But the heritage of the American singer – the first artist, of any gender, to have crossed the 10-figure threshold solely thanks to income from her music – is not the only lesson from the latest ranking of fortunes world celebrities published Tuesday April 2 by Forbes. According to the magazine, Russia’s richest people added $72 billion to their wealth during 2023, bringing their collective wealth to $577 billion in 2024.
As reports it Reuters, in 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine, Forbes had estimated the total wealth of Russian billionaires at $606 billion, about $200 billion more than in 2020 ($385.1 billion).
Many Russian billionaires then fell under Western sanctions due to the war in Ukraine launched by Vladimir Putin in February 2022. Their total fortune then suddenly fell to $353 billion in 2022, before rising again for two years. .
15 additional billionaires
Russia was the fifth country with the highest number of billionaires within the ranking Forbes billionaires 2023with 105 billionaires at the start of 2023, compared to 83 in 2022, 117 in 2021 and 99 in 2020. Moscow now has 120 billionaires in this ranking. In detail, 59 have seen their fortune increase since one and 19 have entered the ranking. According to Forbes, Vagit Alekperov, former president of the oil company Lukoil, occupies the first place among billionaires in Russia. It is ranked 59th globally. His fortune increased from $20.5 billion to $28.6 billion over the past year.
He took the top spot in Russia from Andrei Melnichenko, now seventh, who made his fortune in fertilizer and whose worth fell to $21.1 billion from $25.2 billion at the start of 2023 This Russian living in the United Arab Emirates was 58th in the ranking Forbes billionaires 2023. Leonid Mikhelson, who heads Russian natural gas producer Novatek, is ranked second, his fortune having increased by $5.8 billion to reach $27.4 billion as of April 1, 2024.
Endowed with vast natural resources, the Russian economy has rebounded strongly from the collapse of 2022. Russian businessmen have particularly benefited from the exodus of Western companies, with many companies selling their assets cheaply or seeing their Russian activities seized and local directors installed. Vladimir Putin repeatedly repeats that Western sanctions have failed to destroy the Russian economy and highlights the fact that it grew faster last year than any G7 country , largely responsible for the sanctions. Russian GDP recorded growth of 3.6% in 2023, compared to 2.6% expected this year by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Difficult times ahead
Is the Russian economy really solid? According to Carl Grekou, an economist at the Center for Prospective Studies and International Information (CEPII) interviewed by The Parisian, “We should not take short-term growth figures to conclude that Moscow is doing well.” “It is in the long term that we will see if Russia resists, and we must not underestimate the challenges it will face,” he says.
Our columnist Nicolas Bouzou said nothing else in our columns last August: “The scope of the sanctions is measured in the long term […] The Russian economy has not collapsed, but the sanctions are considerably increasing the cost of its warlike strategy.”
The IMF predicts difficult times for the Russian economy due to the exodus of people and the shortage of technologies. Moreover, Russian growth is largely based on state-financed production of arms and munitions for the war in Ukraine, thus masking the problems that hinder the improvement of Russian living standards.