In 2015 he was Britain’s richest man. In July 2020, 

 listed him as the 45th wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $25.2 billion. His portfolio includes over $3.8 billion in art and real estate, as well as a $2 billion share of the DAZN group and a $6.8 billion stake in chemical giant LyondellBasell Industries.

He also boasts dual citizenship with the US and UK and, in 2017, was granted a knighthood for services to philanthropy, his foundation having donated more than $700 million between 2009 and 2019, including $65 million to the Tate Modern in 2017, $13 million to the US Council on Foreign Relations in 2018 and $10 million to the Mount Sinai Health System also in 2018, alongside numerous donations to universities including Harvard Medical School ($200 million) and Oxford.

But, if there’s one thing Leonard Blavatnik is likely to go down in history for, it’s his purchase of Warner Music for $3.3 billion in 2011. At the time, total global record sales were $15 billion and the deal was widely derided as financial suicide with Blavatnik’s advisors strongly warning him against the deal. Blavatnik, however, was unfazed. As he later told 

, “I was risking my money, not their money.”

Today, thanks to an industry-wide bounce-back, Warner Music is estimated to be worth more than $6 billion, while global streaming shares have grown more than 900 per cent. In other words, Blavatnik has pulled off an astonishing success that almost no one predicted. It is a deal that Music Business World Wide (MBW) has suggested may just be “the shrewdest deal in the history of the record business.”

Not only has the Warner Music deal and subsequent growth catapulted Blavatnik’s already dizzying fortune into the stratosphere, it’s gained him a new level of respect, and perhaps just a small bit of jealousy, among his peers. According to 

, “There are billionaires, multi-billionaires and then there’s Len Blavatnik—a man whose net worth is so big, his network so broad and business goals so ambitious that, these days, he’s seemingly everywhere.”

Before he was everywhere, Blavatnik was next to nowhere. Born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1957, Blavatnik grew up in the depths of the Cold War. Raised not far from Moscow by his professor parents, he would later emigrate to the US and complete a master’s degree in computer science at Columbia University. He landed early roles at Arthur Andersen and General Atlantic Partners, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1989.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Blavatnik recognised the opportunities back east were not to be missed out on. Partnering with Russian businessman (and now 119th richest person in the world) Viktor Vekselberg, Blavatnik co-founded holding company Access Industries in New York.

Together, he and Vekselberg began buying up newly privatised aluminium processing plants across the former Soviet Union. The period became known as the “aluminium wars” with criminal gangs violently competing for a piece of the pie. Blavatnik and Vekselberg emerged with a fortune and today their company is the world’s second largest aluminium producer.

In 1997 Blavatnik and Vekselberg joined forces with Ukrainian billionaire Mikhail Fridman to purchase oil company TNK. 16 years later they sold it to Rosneft in a $55 billion deal; Blavatnik’s share was a cool $7 billion.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Blavatnik’s team has said he finds the term ‘oligarch’ “highly offensive”. As a ‘refusenik’, his spokeswoman claimed Blavatnik was stripped of his Soviet Citizenship on leaving Russia in 1978, and has no involvement in Russian politics, and never has. With $7 billion to burn, Balvatnik was free to turn his investments away from post-Soviet Russia towards property, technology, art and eventually, his savvy-but-eyebrow-raising Warner Music investment.

Today, Blavatnik’s Manhattan property portfolio is estimated to be worth a startling $275 million. And that’s before you take into account his mansion on London’s 

 Palace Gardens (valued at £200 million), and the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera. Other investments include shares in Facebook, Amazon, the Tory Burch fashion house, art galleries, and the Broadway super-smash Hamilton.

He’s also invested hundreds of millions to build DAZN into one of the world’s biggest sports streaming services, signing a $1 billion, eight-year contact with Matchroom Boxing in 2018, and paying Mexican boxer Canelo Alvarez what was, at the time, the biggest contract in the history of sport: $365 million for 11 fights.

But not everything Blavatnik touches turns to gold. In 2005, Blavatnik married LyondellBasell Industries NV to a Houston-based chemical company. The deal was completed in December 2007, and the venture immediately met with disaster in the form of hurricanes closing plants, the global financial crisis, and tragically, a fatal crane accident. Two years later, the company filed for bankruptcy. Although a judge ruled Blavatnik was not to blame, he lost at least $1 billion in the process and landed a lawsuit from his creditors which was finally resolved nearly a decade later.

Some of his media investments weren’t so savvy, either. Following a failed bid to buy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in 2016, keen to strengthen ties to the movie business, Blavatnik lent $45 million to Weinstein Co. Blavatnik’s Access Industries quickly sued the company and Harvey Weinstein personally when the horrific #MeToo movement allegations emerged in 2017. Earlier the same year Blavatnik also bought a controlling stake in film financier Ratpac-Dune Entertainment for an undisclosed sum, making him a partner of (among others) producer Brett Ratner, who was also later accused of sexual assault. Blavatnik sold his shares in Ratpac-Dune Entertainment not long after becoming involved.

Many of Blavatnik’s media investments, however, have been more successful. He currently owns AI Film, an independent production company which financed successful and critically praised films 

 (both in 2015). He was also an early investor in the wildly popular Beats Music.

A portrait of Blavatnik by Danor Shtruzman


While not politically active in Russia, Blavatnik has been criticised for his political donations in the US. According to the Federal Election Commission, he has donated an estimated $4.5 million to US presidential candidates from both the Democrat and Republican parties since 1996. In 2011 he donated to both Barack Obama and his rival Mitt Romney. Controversially, he also donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee after his election. In 2017, this donation caused Bo Rothstein, a professor of government and public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, to quit in protest. The school was established through a £75 million gift from Blavatnik.

What’s more, Viktor Vekselberg was sanctioned by the US last year in the wake of the investigation into Russian influence in Trump’s presidential campaign, and made to pay a $2.2 billion penalty. While Blavatnik has not been implicated, Vekselberg’s cousin Andrew Intrater had also donated to Trump’s inaugural committee.

In his purchase of Warner Music, Blavatnik through foresight or luck or a combination of the two has likely achieved what many investors dream of, namely recuperating his investment while maintaining a majority share in the company.

But, ultimately, amassing large sums of money does very little for anyone except the individual sitting on the bank account. This is where Len Blavatnik differs, for it is not his savvy business acumen that should be remembered, or indeed that he made shedloads off a record label, but his philanthropic work and donations to the cultural sphere. If more billionaires followed Blavatnik’s example, it really would be one for the record books.

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