Russian billionaires bounce right back
I’ve been spending an enjoyable morning surfing the latest Forbes billionaires list, which is packed full of tidbits on all the wealth creators who do so much to make life worth living (for themselves). It’s unusual for me to be pleased to see the arrival of a new billionaire, but I’ll make an exception for Peter Jackson because the Lord of the Rings films got my family through three consecutive weekends during lockdown, which is just about enough for me to forgive him for the Hobbit trilogy, which we watched over the subsequent three weekends. They were so awful that a 15-minute washing up scene counted as a genuine highlight.
Despite the good news of Jackson’s ascent to what Forbes calls “the three-comma club,” there are 87 fewer billionaires this year than last and those who remain have taken a hit to their wealth.
- “They’re worth a collective $12.7 trillion, $400 billion less than in 2021. The most dramatic drops have occurred in Russia, where there are 34 fewer billionaires than last year following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Forbes notes.
Well, that’s good. We can pat ourselves on our backs. Sanctions have worked, and Putin’s oligarch chums have suffered for the Kremlin’s misdeeds.
- “You have to pay for everything in your life. Even for your friendship with the president,” said Gennady Timchenko, in the pull-quote attached to his profile on the Forbes website.
Mr Timchenko is an old friend of Putin’s who made his money as an oil trader, and indeed received a license to export oil from Putin himself back in 1991, when the future president was a mere city official. He has now slumped from being the 78th richest man in the world, to being 173, which is a dramatic demonstration of the might of Western sanctions.