Len Blavatnik

Based on Wikipedia: Len Blavatnik

In the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, a handful of men figured out how to buy an empire for pennies on the dollar. Leonard Blavatnik was one of them.

Today he's worth over twenty-six billion dollars, owns Warner Music Group, and has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his philanthropy. He's also been sanctioned by Ukraine's President Zelensky, accused of reputation laundering, and remains entangled in questions about his connections to the very oligarch networks that Western sanctions are designed to punish.

How one person can occupy all these positions simultaneously tells you something important about how money moves through the modern world—and how the lines between legitimate business, geopolitical influence, and moral ambiguity have become almost impossible to draw.

From Odesa to Manhattan

Blavatnik was born in 1957 in Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea that was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. His family was Jewish, and when he was still a child, they moved north to Yaroslavl, a Russian city about 150 miles from Moscow.

He enrolled at the Moscow State University of Railway Engineering—not the most glamorous credential, but this is where he made a connection that would shape his fortune. A fellow student named Viktor Vekselberg, also a Ukrainian Jew, would later found the Renova Group and become one of Russia's most prominent oligarchs.

Blavatnik never finished his degree. His family applied for emigration visas, a risky move in the Soviet system that often meant being labeled a traitor and losing your job, your apartment, and your social standing while you waited—sometimes for years—to find out if you'd be allowed to leave.

They got out in 1978.

In America, Blavatnik reinvented himself. He earned a master's degree in computer science from Columbia University in 1981, then an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1989. By 1986, he had founded Access Industries, the holding company that would become his vehicle for building a global empire.

The Aluminum Grab

What happened in Russia during the 1990s remains one of the most staggering transfers of wealth in human history.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the state owned essentially everything—the oil fields, the aluminum smelters, the nickel mines, the factories. Privatization was supposed to distribute this wealth broadly to Russian citizens through voucher programs. Instead, a small group of well-connected men—many of them with technical backgrounds and an understanding of how to navigate both Soviet bureaucracy and emerging capitalist markets—managed to acquire these assets for almost nothing.

Blavatnik was perfectly positioned. He had American citizenship, Harvard credentials, and his childhood friendship with Viktor Vekselberg provided a bridge into the networks that were carving up the Russian economy.

Through Access Industries, he began accumulating shares in aluminum smelters. Aluminum production is what economists call "energy-intensive"—it requires enormous amounts of electricity. The genius move was that one of his investments, a company called Sual, also bought regional electricity generating stations. They could supply their own power to their own smelters, vertically integrating the business in a way that locked out competitors.

Sual eventually became part of United Company Rusal, which grew into the world's largest aluminum producer. Blavatnik sat on Rusal's board from 2007 to 2016.

The Oil Deal That Made Billions

Aluminum was lucrative, but oil was where the real money flowed.

In 1997, Blavatnik's Access Industries joined forces with his old friend Vekselberg's Renova Group and another oligarch, Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group. Together they formed AAR—the name is simply an acronym of the three founding companies: Alfa, Access, Renova.

Blavatnik's particular value to the consortium was his role as a bridge to Western business. He was an American citizen, Harvard-educated, fluent in the language and customs of international finance. When you needed to negotiate with a British oil major, Blavatnik was your man.

AAR bought forty percent of a struggling state oil company called Tyumen Oil, known by its Russian abbreviation TNK. The price was eight hundred million dollars. According to reports at the time, they actually paid only about a quarter of the agreed sum—the kind of thing that was possible in the lawless environment of Russian privatization.

TNK then began acquiring other assets, focusing particularly on an oil company called Sidanko that was partially owned by British Petroleum, better known as BP. In 1999, TNK acquired Sidanko's best assets through bankruptcy proceedings—a legal mechanism that, in Russia's corrupted courts, could be wielded like a weapon.

BP was furious. They sued TNK in New York, claiming the Sidanko assets had been acquired illegally.

But here's where the story takes an unexpected turn. Rather than fighting to the death, BP decided to buy its way in. In 2003, they acquired TNK for eight billion dollars, creating a joint venture called TNK-BP. The deal gave BP unprecedented access to Russian oil and gas. It also made Blavatnik, Fridman, and Vekselberg extraordinarily wealthy, as they now controlled half of one of Russia's largest oil companies.

The final act came in 2013, when the Russian state oil company Rosneft—controlled by Vladimir Putin's government—paid AAR twenty-eight billion dollars in cash for its fifty percent stake in TNK-BP. Add the nineteen billion in dividends they'd collected over the years, and the return on their original investment was almost six-fold.

The Great Diversification

With billions from Russian oil and aluminum, Blavatnik began building a very different kind of empire.

In 2005, Access Industries bought a petrochemicals company called Basell Polyolefins from Royal Dutch Shell and the German chemical giant BASF for 5.7 billion dollars. Two years later, Basell acquired Lyondell Chemical Company for nineteen billion, creating LyondellBasell Industries—at the time, the world's eighth-largest chemical company.

The timing was catastrophic. In January 2009, as the global financial crisis reached its depths, LyondellBasell's American operations filed for bankruptcy. But Blavatnik didn't give up. By April 2010, the company emerged from Chapter 11 protection, restructured and refinanced. Today, LyondellBasell is the world's largest producer of polypropylene, the plastic used in everything from food packaging to medical equipment, and Access Industries still controls twenty-one percent of it.

But the acquisition that captured public imagination came in 2011: Warner Music Group.

For 3.3 billion dollars, Blavatnik bought one of the three major record labels, home to artists from Led Zeppelin to Ed Sheeran. The music industry was in crisis, ravaged by online piracy and uncertain how to adapt to the streaming age. Critics questioned whether Blavatnik was buying a trophy or a turnaround opportunity.

He got both. By 2020, when Warner Music went public again on the Nasdaq stock exchange, the company was valued at 13.3 billion dollars. Blavatnik sold 1.9 billion dollars worth of shares in the offering, more than half his original purchase price, while retaining majority control.

The Sports Streaming Gamble

In 2014, Blavatnik's Access Industries took majority control of what would become DAZN Group, pronounced "da zone"—a sports streaming service with ambitions to become the Netflix of live sports.

The strategy was straightforward in theory but ruinously expensive in practice: buy the rights to broadcast major sporting events, then convince fans to pay monthly subscriptions to watch them.

In 2018, DAZN signed an eight-year, one-billion-dollar deal with Matchroom Boxing. That same year, they paid six hundred million euros for Italian Serie A football rights. Most spectacularly, they signed Mexican boxer Saul "Canelo" Alvarez to a 365-million-dollar contract—the largest commercial deal in history between a company and a single athlete.

Then the pandemic hit. Live sports stopped. DAZN refused to pay European football leagues for games that couldn't be played. The company's 2019 financial results showed losses of more than 1.3 billion dollars.

Blavatnik doubled down. In February 2022, he agreed to a 4.3-billion-dollar recapitalization of DAZN. In January 2025, DAZN acquired the Australian broadcaster Foxtel from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and Telstra for 3.4 billion Australian dollars.

The bet is that live sports remain one of the few things people will pay for in real time. Whether that bet pays off remains to be seen.

The Philanthropy Question

Blavatnik has given away enormous sums of money. His Blavatnik Family Foundation supports universities, scientific research, arts institutions, and Jewish cultural organizations.

Yale, Harvard, and Oxford have all received major donations. In 2010, Oxford named its new school of government after him—the Blavatnik School of Government. In 2011, he donated more than fifty million pounds to the Tate Modern gallery in London, the largest gift in the museum's history. The gallery's new extension now bears his name.

But philanthropy, for oligarchs, is never simple.

In 2017, twenty-one academics signed a letter published in The Guardian criticizing Oxford for accepting Blavatnik's money. They argued that his fortune was accumulated through the same privatization schemes that impoverished ordinary Russians and enriched a small elite with connections to the Kremlin.

That same year, political scientist Bo Rothstein resigned from the Blavatnik School of Government specifically because of Blavatnik's political donations in the United States—particularly his contributions to Republican candidates and the Trump inauguration.

The term that keeps recurring in criticism is "reputation laundering"—the idea that philanthropy can be used to buy social acceptance and deflect attention from how money was originally acquired. Blavatnik's supporters counter that his donations have genuinely advanced education and the arts, and that the man himself left the Soviet Union as a young emigrant and built his fortune through legitimate business dealings.

The Oligarch Question

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western governments scrambled to sanction Russian oligarchs—freezing their assets, banning them from travel, attempting to pressure Vladimir Putin's inner circle.

Blavatnik presents a puzzle for this framework.

He is not a Russian citizen; he holds British and American passports. He left the Soviet Union in 1978 and has lived in the West ever since. He sold his last major Russian asset—his stake in Rusal—in 2022.

But his fortune was made through the same privatization schemes that created the oligarch class. His longtime business partner Viktor Vekselberg has been sanctioned by the American government. And in December 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally imposed sanctions on Blavatnik.

Blavatnik vigorously denies any connection to Putin. He has attempted, through legal and public relations efforts, to avoid being labeled an oligarch at all. The word itself is contested—technically it just means rule by a few wealthy individuals, but in modern usage it has come to imply ill-gotten gains and proximity to authoritarian power.

The debate matters because it determines whether someone can buy respectability. If Blavatnik is simply a shrewd businessman who happened to recognize opportunities in post-Soviet chaos, then his donations to Oxford and the Tate are straightforward philanthropy. If he's a product of a corrupt system that continues to threaten democratic values, then every institution that accepts his money becomes complicit.

The Political Donor

American campaign finance laws create their own kind of transparency, and Blavatnik's political donations reveal a pragmatic approach to influence.

In 2011, he donated to both President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney—a classic hedge. But by 2015-2016, he had become one of the largest donors to the Republican Party, giving 7.35 million dollars to various candidates including Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and John McCain.

The Trump era complicated things. In February 2016, Blavatnik donated over a million dollars to an anti-Trump Republican group. But after Trump won, he gave a million dollars to the inauguration committee. He also contributed 3.5 million dollars to Mitch McConnell's super PAC and has donated to the Republican National Committee.

He hasn't ignored Democrats entirely. His donations have included money to Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden.

Two senior Trump administration officials have been registered as lobbyists for Blavatnik's Access Industries. The revolving door between business and government spins regardless of party.

The Israel Lobby

In 2024, reporting by The Washington Post revealed that Blavatnik was a member of a WhatsApp group chat involving some of America's most powerful business leaders. The group, which existed from November 2023 through early May 2024, had explicit goals: "changing the narrative" in favor of Israel and "helping win the war" on American public opinion following Hamas's October 7th attack.

Members of the group discussed receiving private briefings from Israeli government officials. They participated in a video call with New York City Mayor Eric Adams in an effort to pressure Columbia University's president to allow police onto campus to clear pro-Palestinian protesters. They discussed making political donations to Adams. Blavatnik himself solicited donations from others in the group.

Separately, protesters outside the Tate Modern accused Blavatnik of working to stifle criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by facilitating a particular appointment at an Israeli television channel. Blavatnik's spokesperson denied any involvement.

The Man Behind the Money

Leonard Blavatnik lives in a Grade II listed building on Kensington Palace Gardens in London—a street sometimes called "Billionaires' Row" and reportedly the most expensive residential street in the world. His neighbors include the Israeli and Russian ambassadors. The property is valued at two hundred million pounds. He also maintains a Manhattan residence worth over 250 million dollars.

He is married to Emily Appelson Blavatnik. They have four children.

In 2013, France made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, one of that country's highest distinctions. In 2017, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for services to philanthropy.

He sits on the boards of Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street Y, and the Center for Jewish History. He's a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Board of Governors at Tel Aviv University.

These are the credentials of a man who has been fully accepted into the Anglo-American establishment. They are also the credentials that critics say can be purchased.

What His Story Tells Us

The Blavatnik case illuminates a fundamental tension in how global capitalism operates.

We want to believe that wealth is either clean or dirty, that people are either legitimate businessmen or corrupt oligarchs, that institutions should either accept money or refuse it on principle. But the real world doesn't sort so neatly.

Blavatnik's aluminum and oil investments were legal under Russian law at the time. Whether that law was just, whether the privatization process was fair, whether ordinary Russians were robbed of their birthright—these are questions that can be argued endlessly without resolution. The assets he acquired were sold to him by a government that claimed the authority to sell them. The profits he extracted were permitted by courts that claimed the authority to adjudicate.

When he moved those profits to London and New York, invested in chemical companies and record labels and sports streaming services, he was doing what capitalists do. The money became fungible, mixing with all the other money flowing through global markets.

And when he donated to universities and museums, he was doing what philanthropists do—using private wealth to support public goods that governments either can't or won't fund.

The question is whether any of this can be separated from the system that made it possible. Whether a man who profited from the implosion of the Soviet Union can ever fully wash that history away. Whether institutions that accept his money are being pragmatic or complicit.

There is no clean answer. There may not even be a useful one. But in a world where sanctioned oligarchs brush up against knighted philanthropists, where the same person can be celebrated by Oxford and sanctioned by Kyiv, understanding how we got here matters.

Leonard Blavatnik's biography is, in that sense, a map of our contradictions.