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.