In the 1990s, nobody in Russia stood above Boris Berezovsky—not even the President of Russia. He built his estimated fortune of $40bn with interests in oil, media, banking, and aviation by cutting deals with bureaucrats and fellow businessmen, rapidly intimidating and charming his way to wealth.
After a change of guard in the Kremlin in the early 2000s, newly elected President Vladimir Putin began to view his former friend and ally Berezovsky as a billionaire run amok and as a danger to his own power. A clash over media ownership and a subsequent fall from grace followed—Berezovsky, having lost most of his money, fled to the United Kingdom and spent the remainder of his life tied up in courtroom battles over his fortune and sponsoring anti-Putin movements in Russia.
Rising from an obscure government mathematician to an all-powerful oligarch, Berezovsky epitomized an era—of shady corridor politics and violent gangster capitalism, of post-Soviet chaos and revolutionized social mores. Before dying in London in 2013—an apparent suicide in mysterious circumstances—Berezovsky penned this essay as a final stroke of his legacy, detailing his philosophy of money and money-getting.
