According to the Bloomberg Millionaire Index, the fortune of businessman Leonard Blavatnik has grown by 56%, to $ 25.6 billion, over the past five years. This allowed him to rise from the 48th to the 31st line in the ranking of the 500 richest people in the world. Bloomberg told how a US-British businessman from Odessa was able to do it.

What earned Blavatnik. The main assets of a businessman do not resemble each other as much as possible. The largest shares of his fortune are in the chemical company LyondellBasel ($ 6.8 billion) and the label Warner Music ($ 5.7 billion). On the third line is the holding Acess Industies ($ 3.8 billion) and investments in real estate and art (also $ 3.8 billion).

Music. Blavatnik bought a 100% stake in Warner Music for $ 3.3 billion in 2011, when it was not clear whether the music industry could learn how to make money on the Internet. According to Bloomberg, the company can now cost $ 6 billion. Warner's revenue over the past four years has been the fastest growing in the industry, and music sales, contrary to fears, have grown. If this trend continues, Warner Music will become the second largest music label in the world after Universal, which accounts for 31% of the market.

Chemistry. Creating giant LyondellBasell Industries Bloomberg calls Blavatnik's “craziest bet,” and Forbes the “greatest deal in the history of Wall Street.” LyondellBasell was created on the basis of two problem companies - Danish Basell NV (Blavatnik bought it in 2005) and ethylene producer Lyondell Chemical Co. Basell and Lyondell merger was estimated at $ 20 billion and occurred at the end of 2007 - a few months before the collapse of the American market and the beginning of a recession. As if this was not enough, the deal was followed by a series of problems - only in 2008, several LyondellBasell factories in Texas had to be closed due to injuries sustained during Hurricane Ike, and another factory collapsed crane killed four workers. Blavatnik had to go into bankruptcy Lyondell, which cost him $ 1 billion. But after bankruptcy, the businessman was able to regain the package, buying up the depreciated shares, and did not lose - the American "shale revolution" caused a sharp rise in the price of gas, the main raw material for chemical plants of LyondellBasell, and shares companies grew fourfold. Total Blavatnik invested $ 3 billion in LyondellBasell Industries, now his package is worth about $ 6.8 billion, while dividends and the sale of shares to the market have brought him another $ 3.8 billion.
The property. Blavatnik owns houses in central London, a hotel in the French Riviera and real estate in Manhattan for a total of $ 275 million. All of them brought income against the backdrop of rising real estate prices in developed countries, which only recently slowed down.

Entertainment. Through the New York holding Access Industries, Blavatnik invested in major Internet companies - for example, Amazon, Facebook and Spotify. The same holding owns Russian Amedia. Through her, Blavatnik supported the production of the T-34 film, which collected more than 2 billion rubles at the box office. This is the fourth largest collection in the history of Russian film distribution. This is not the only billionaire's cinema investment: in 2016, Blavatnik lent $ 45 million to Weinstein Co., the holding company of Harvey Weinstein. When charges were brought against him, Blavatnik’s holding sued for breach of contract.

Relations with Russia. Blavatnik tries to disown from ties with historical homeland. A representative of a businessman even asked Bloomberg not to call him an oligarch: he is not on the US sanctions list, he has nothing to do with Russian politics, and lost his citizenship back in 1978. Nevertheless, Blavatnik, who was born in Odessa, was built in Russia, reminds Bloomberg. After studying in the United States, first at the Faculty of Computer Science at Columbia University, and then receiving an MBA from Harvard, he returned to Russia.

Together with a fellow student of MIIT (Blavatnik dropped out of high school in his fourth year), Viktor Vekselberg, he registered Access Industries in New York. Through it, partners began to buy aluminum-related assets. The largest acquisition was the purchase of 40% of TNK, together with Vekselberg and Mikhail Fridman in 1997. A few years later, 50% in TNCs was bought by British BP. In 2013, TNK-BP bought Rosneft, Friedman, Vekselberg and Blavatnik received a total of $ 27.7 billion.

Blavatnik still has a stake in another Russian company, UC Rusal, which is gradually recovering after sanctions. Through the joint venture with Viktor Vekselberg, Sual Partners Blavatnik owns a $ 400 million Rusal package.

Medicine, education and Trump. Blavatnik actively donates money to charity. Since 2009, donations through the Blavatnik Foundation amounted to more than $ 700 million. The main recipient is the Harvard School of Medicine ($ 200 million), followed by the Blavatnik School of Management at Oxford University ($ 115 million).

Blavatnik actively donates to various political forces in the United States. In particular, he allocated $ 1 billion to the inaugural commission of Donald Trump.

Blavatnik was severely criticized for this, and one of the professors at the Oxford School of Management even quit, saying that he did not want to work in an organization whose donor supported Trump.

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