Yuri Milner

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Yuri Milner, 2010.

Johannes Simon—Hubert Burda Media/Getty Images/Thinkstock

Yuri Milneris a Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist whose innovative investment techniques and prescient awareness of the commercial potential of the Internet revolutionized venture-capital investment strategies in the 2010s.

Milner grew up in a Jewish family in Moscow. His father, a university professor, wrote or edited some 50 books on American business management practices. His mother was a physician. As a teenager, Milner took night courses in computer programming. After earning a degree in theoretical physics from Moscow State University (B.A./B.S., 1985), he pursued a Ph.D. in particle physics. While a graduate student, he found success selling personal computers on the gray (quasi-legal) market and, with his father’s support, abandoned physics in 1990 to undertake M.B.A. studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Although he did not complete that degree, he went on to work for three years in the financial sector branch of the World Bank.

Upon his return to Moscow in the mid-1990s, Milner sought a place in post-Soviet Russia’s emerging capitalist economy, working first for influential oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Alliance-Menatep brokerage firm. In 1998 Milner and other investors bought a macaroni manufacturer and transformed it into a very successful concern. The next year, Milner cofounded a venture capital firm, NetBridge, and began investing in Russian Internet companies. When the Internet bubble burst in 2000–01, NetBridge merged with Port.ru, which, as Mail.ru, became one of Russia’s most successful Internet companies. Milner was its chief executive officer (2001–03). In 2005 Milner cofounded the holding company Digital Sky Technologies, which acquired control of Mail.ru and between 2005 and 2011 invested some $1 billion in more than two dozen businesses.

During this time Milner founded DST Global and began broadening his investment horizon further. In 2009 he shocked Silicon Valley when he bought a 2 percent stake in Facebook for DST and Mail.ru for $200 million, more than two years before the social network’s initial public offering. Not only was Milner’s buy-in widely considered to be wildly overvalued, but he also abjured the perks usually considered prerequisites for such early-stage investment, most notably a seat on the company’s board. By 2010, however, as online social networks skyrocketed in popularity, the value of Milner’s concerns’ initial investment had swelled to about $1 billion (a total investment of $800 million yielded a value of about $5 billion by 2011). By making similar well-timed early investments in other Internet companies—including group discounter Groupon, gaming company Zynga, music provider Spotify, and microblogging service Twitter—Milner watched his personal fortune grow to an estimated $1.1 billion by 2013.

Although Moscow remained the headquarters of his growing empire, the perpetually globe-trotting Milner bought a $100 million mansion in Los Altos Hills, California, that was among the most expensive homes in the United States. In 2012 he established the Fundamental Physics Prize, which annually awarded $3 million each to nine physicists for their achievements in fundamental physics. In 2013 he also joined Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and others in establishing the similarly generous Breakthrough Prize in Life Science.

In early November 2017 the sheen came off Milner’s prescient investments in Facebook and Twitter when it was revealed that they had been directly and indirectly funded by a pair of Russian government-controlled financial institutions, Gazprom Investholding and VTB Bank, respectively. The revelation came as several U.S. congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller were investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including widespread Russian disbursement of “fake news” on Facebook that had been aimed at undermining the candidacy of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Clinton lost to Republican Donald Trump, who became the 45th U.S. president but whose campaign was investigated for possible collusion in Russian efforts to influence the election.

The revelation of Gazprom Investholding’s and VTB Bank’s involvement in Milner’s social media investments was part of the so-called Paradise Papers, a trove of more than 13 million leaked documents dating from 1950 to 2016 that focused on Appleby, a Bermuda-based law firm that helped its clients hide their assets in offshore tax havens. Like the Panama Papers published in 2016, the documents came to light through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Milner argued that VTB Bank’s backing had not won it any influence at Twitter, and he claimed to be unaware of Gazprom’s role in the Facebook deal. The Paradise Papers also pointed to Milner’s financial involvement in Cadre, a company that had been founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, though there was no implication that this link was related to the Russian government’s investments in Facebook and Twitter.