Foreign billionaires born in the USSR

Global Russians, who were born in the USSR and became billionaires abroad.
111 Russians, 9 Ukrainians, several representatives of Kazakhstan and other former Soviet countries, including the first-ever holder of $ 1 billion from Lithuania were included in Forbes 2014 Billionaires List.
In the list you can find a lot of names of businessmen who were born in the Soviet Union or in the families of Russian immigrants, but built or inherited large business already abroad.
Here are nine bright Global Russians.

Sergey Brin

In the list of Forbes: № 19
Net Worth: $ 31.8 billion
Age: 40 years
Source of income: Google
Nationality: United States
Sergey Brin is a Google co-founder. At the age of six his family immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union. His grandfather and father were mathematicians and his mother was an engineer. In the Stanford University Brin met Larry Page, with whom he later became friends and started up Google in a rented garage.

Leonard Blavatnik

In the list of Forbes: № 39
Net Worth: $ 18.7 billion
Age: 56 years
Source of income: Various
Nationality: United States
Leonid Blavatnik emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union. When he became an American citizen in 1981 he changed his name to Leonard. He, like many others, moved to America with his parents. Blavatnik studied at the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineering together with his future business partner Viktor Vekselberg.

Jan Koum

In the list of Forbes: № 202
Net Worth: $ 6.8 billion
Age: 38 years
Source of income: WhatsApp
Nationality: United States
In February 2014 Mobile messenger WhatsApp, created by Jan Koum, was bought by Facebook for $ 19 billion.
Jan was born in a poor family of a housewife and a builder in a small village near Kiev. After the collapse of the USSR sixteen-year-old Koum and his mother moved to California. For almost ten years Jan has been working for Yahoo. Now he continues to develop his project within Facebook business empire.

Harry Trigubov

In the list of Forbes: № 281
Net Worth: $ 5 billion
Age: 81 years
Source of income: construction
Nationality: Australia
Harry Trigubov built his first apartment building in a suburb of Sydney in the early 1960s. Now his company Meriton is the largest in Australia by the number of sold apartments.
Trigubov was born in the Chinese city of Dalian, where his parents moved after the revolution. 14-year-old boy and his brother were sent to study in Sydney. Then they studied at the textile college in England to continue their father’s work, but something went wrong and father sent them back to Sydney.

Igor Olenikov

In the list of Forbes: № 580
Net Worth: $ 2.9 billion
Age: 71 years
Source of income: property
Nationality: United States
A son of poor Russian immigrants earned $ 2.9 billion. He moved to the U.S. in 1950. 40-year-old Olenikov created the company Olen Properties, which owns 6.4 million square meters of office space and 12,000 apartments in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona.

Margarita Louis-Dreyfus

In the list of Forbes: № 165
Net Worth: $ 8.1 billion
Age: 50 years
Source of income: trade
Citizenship: Switzerland
Margarita Louis-Dreyfus received the trading company Louis Dreyfus after the death of her husband Robert in 2009.
Tsaritsa (Queen) as she is called in the French press, was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and raised by her grandfather. In the 80s Margarita married a Swiss student and moved to Zurich. Her second husband, owner of the company, she met on the plane.

Lev Leviev

In the list of Forbes: № 1284
Net Worth: $ 1.3 billion
Age: 58 years
Source of income: diamonds
Nationality: Israel
Diamond billionaire’s family moved from Uzbekistan to Israel in 1971, where Leviev after graduation and military service began working as diamond grinder and soon opened his own production company.

Eugene Shvidler

In the list of Forbes: № 1465
Net Worth: $ 1.1 billion
Age: 49 years
Source of income: oil, gas, investments
Nationality: United States
Shvidler, who became an American citizen in 1994, is Roman Abramovich’s partner. They have been working together for almost 20 years. In 2006, Abramovich even gave his friend a yacht worth $ 140 million.

Alexander Knaster

In the list of Forbes: № 828
Net Worth: $ 2.1 billion
Age: 55 years
Source of income: oil, telecom, banks
Nationality: United States
Alexander Knaster was born in Moscow. In 1976 Knaster with his parents moved to the U.S.
In the 90s, he returned to Russia and led the Russian branch of Credit Suisse First Boston, then – Alfa Bank. In 2004, Knaster together with business partners created an investment firm Pamplona Capital Management.
Source: www.forbes.ru