Prokhorov founded Onexim Group, a Moscow-based company with interests in banking, insurance and real estate. He also holds stakes in banks Renaissance Capital and Renaissance Credit. Prokhorov owned the Brooklyn Nets basketball team and its home arena before selling them to fellow billionaire Joe Tsai.
Mikhail Prokhorov's net worth of $13.5B can buy ...
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The majority of Prokhorov's fortune is derived from the proceeds of asset sales he began making in 2007, when he and billionaire partner Vladimir Potanin began to split the metals holdings they amassed after the fall of the Soviet Union. He has received about $9 billion in cash since 2007, including $5.3 billion from United Company Rusal for his 25% stake in Norilsk Nickel.
Prokhorov sold his 38% stake in Polyus Gold for $3.6 billion in January 2013. He bought a 27.8% stake in Uralkali, a potash producer, in December 2013, paying about $4.9 billion. He later reduced his stake to 20%, and sold it in July 2016.
Prokhorov sold 49% of the Brooklyn Nets basketball club to Joseph Tsai in 2017 and the rest in 2019. He invested $400 million in the team and its arena between 2009 and 2015.
His closely held banking and insurance interests include Renaissance Capital, Renaissance Credit, IFC-bank and Soglassiye Insurance.
Mikhail Prokhorov was born in Moscow in 1965 to Dmitry, the head of the international department for the Soviet Sport Committee, and Tamara, who worked at the Institute for Chemical Materials.
Prokhorov held various jobs as a student, including unloading meat and cement from rail cars. While in college, he and his friends made and sold acid-washed jeans out of a Moscow laundry. According to Prokhorov, he made 60 times more money than the average Soviet engineer selling jeans. He graduated from the Moscow State Finance Institute in 1989. His parents died when he was in his early 20s.
In the early 1990s, Prokhorov met Vladimir Potanin, who briefly worked as Russia's first deputy prime minister in charge of economy, energy and national property during Boris Yeltsin's second term as president. Prokhorov became chairman of Onexim Bank in 1993, then Russia's largest closely held commercial bank, which he created with Potanin. The bank began to make loans to the cash-starved Russian government in exchange for liens on equity in the country's natural resource companies. The practice became known as the loans-for-shares program. The Russian government rarely was able to repay the loans, and privatized large swaths of its assets in the process.
Among Onexim Bank's most successful endeavors was financing the privatization of Norilsk Nickel. Prokhorov was put in charge of the firm, serving as chief executive officer from 2001 to 2007, and helped to transform the company into the world's largest nickel and palladium producer.
He sold his 25 percent stake in Norilsk Nickel in 2008 to billionaire Oleg Deripaska in a deal that brought him more than $5 billion cash and 14 percent of aluminum producer United Co. Rusal. The sale came a year after he was arrested for allegedly arranging prostitutes for guests at a hotel in the French skiing resort of Courchevel. He was never charged. Following the scandal, Potanin and Prokhorov began the split of their assets.
In February 2013, he sold the 38 percent stake he held in Polyus Gold. He was the owner of the National Basketball Association's Brooklyn Nets and the team's New York arena, the Barclays Center, before selling them to billionaire Joe Tsai in 2017-2019.
Prokhorov entered politics in 2011, first heading the pro-business Right Cause party, and then running independently for president in March 2012 against Vladimir Putin. He lost, getting 7.98 percent of the votes.