What is Yuri Milner’s Net Worth?
Yuri Milner is a Soviet-born Israeli billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, scientist, and philanthropist who has a net worth of $6 billion. Yuri Milner co-founded the investment firm DST Global. Through the firm, he has invested in such major Internet companies as Facebook, Airbnb, Alibaba, and Spotify. Among his many other ventures, Milner co-founded the Russian Internet company NetBridge and the philanthropic science-based Breakthrough Prizes.
Early Life and Education
Yuri Milner was born on November 11, 1961 into a Jewish family in Moscow, Russia, in what was then the Soviet Union. He is the second child and only son of Soviet intellectuals Betty and Bentsion. For his higher education, Milner attended Moscow State University, from which he earned his BS degree in theoretical physics in 1985. Although he subsequently became a doctoral candidate in particle physics, he ultimately decided to leave the field behind and pursue a career in business. Milner went on to obtain his MBA degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Start of Business Career
Milner began his business career selling gray-market DOS computers in the Soviet Union; he stopped doing this following the collapse of the USSR. After earning his MBA in the early 1990s, Milner began working as a Russian banking specialist at the World Bank in Washington, DC. In 1995, he was named CEO of the stock brokerage company Alliance-Menatep, which was owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Late the next year, Milner became vice president and head of investment management at Menatep Bank, and soon after that became the Bank’s deputy chairperson.
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NetBridge and Mail.ru Group
In 1999, Milner decided to take advantage of the dot-com bubble and create his own Internet company. With funding from Gregory Finger and New Century Holding, he co-founded NetBridge, and subsequently became its president. The company found success by transferring various US-pioneered Internet business models to Russia. In doing this, NetBridge created such websites as List.ru, Boom.ru, and Molotok.ru. The company went on to merge with Port.ru in 2001 to form Mail.ru, of which Milner became the CEO. In 2005, Milner founded the investment fund Digital Sky Technologies, and soon became its chairperson. The company was renamed Mail.ru Group in 2010, and went public on the London Stock Exchange. Milner stepped down as chairperson of Mail.ru Group in 2012.
DST Global
In 2009, Milner co-founded the venture capital and private equity firm DST Global as a separate entity from Mail.ru Group. The firm primarily invests in late-stage Internet companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Alibaba, WhatsApp, and ByteDance. In 2017, it was reported by the New York Times that Milner and DST Global had substantial Kremlin backing for their prior investments in Facebook and Twitter. However, Milner denied allegations that he was colluding with Russia to undermine US democracy via social media. Since 2014, DST Global has had no institutional investors from Russia.
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Philanthropy
Milner is significantly involved in philanthropy. In 2012, he and his wife established the Breakthrough Prizes, a set of international awards recognizing scientific advances in physics, the life sciences, and mathematics. Recipients are given $3 million each in prize money, making the Breakthrough Prizes the largest scientific awards in the world. An awards ceremony is held annually featuring celebrities, comedy, and live music. Adding to their philanthropy, the Milners launched the Breakthrough Initiatives in 2015. A science-based program, it seeks to find extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe by investing in research and the development of specialized technology.
In their other philanthropic endeavors, the Milners founded the Milner Foundation, which has donated to many organizations focused on medical research and humanitarian relief. In 2022, the Foundation pledged $100 million to Tech for Refugees, which uses technology to provide relief to refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Milners have also made donations to the National Academy of Sciences and the Australian Academy of Science, among other organizations supporting scientists. Elsewhere, the pair belongs to the Giving Pledge, through which they vow to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes during their lifetimes.
Search for Aliens
In 2015, Yuri announced alongside Stephen Hawking a program to spend $100 million to search for aliens. In a statement the duo said:
“We’re committed to bringing the Silicon Valley approach to the search for intelligent life in the universe. Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks.”
A year later he announced a commitment of an additional $100 million. He soon announced his plan to launch a relatively inexpensive probe to Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.
Enceladus is getting a lot of attention as NASA has also announced plans to send up a robot probe in order to search for possible extraterrestrial life within its thick, long-frozen ice. But Milner’s plan is to get a probe up much more quickly than NASA would be able to, which he says could take at least a decade. His goal is to provide “supplementary” data that would aid NASA in its goal, perhaps by revealing whether or not an expensive mission to Enceladus is likely to produce any significant findings.
“Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon, and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes, try to see what’s going on there?”
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Personal Life
In 2004, Milner married model and artist Julia Bochkova. Together, they have three daughters. In 2011, Milner purchased a home in Los Altos Hills, California for $100 million. Spanning three plots across seven hectares, the compound includes a 25,500-square-foot main house and a 5,500-square-foot guest house.
In 1999, Milner became an Israeli citizen, and in 2005 moved with his family to Israel. Having made clear his independence from Russian government and corporate interests, and having denounced the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Milner officially renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022. Milner took to his official Twitter account to make the announcement, which lays out his actions in straightforward and unadorned language:
“My family and I left Russia for good in 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea. And this summer, we officially completed the process of renouncing our Russian citizenship.”
The natural conclusion is that Milner made the decision to completely cut his personal ties with Russia in response to the war in Ukraine, but he didn’t elaborate in the tweet or through a spokesperson, reports The Wall Street Journal. But on his website, Milner says he’s been a citizen of Israel since 1999, and that he’s lived with his family in the US since 2014, the same year he left Russia.
Milner’s website also declared that he owns no financial assets in Russia, and that the lion’s share (97 percent) of his fortune was created outside the country where he was born.
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