What is Bill Browder's Net Worth?
Bill Browder is a financier and political activist who has a net worth of $100 million. Bill Browder is the co-founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, at one time among the largest international investors in Russia. At the peak of the fund's performance, it managed more than $4.5 billion in assets.
Bill Browder is infamous for taking on a number of large, corrupt Russian companies through the firm, resulting in his deportation to the UK and his designation as a Russian national security threat in 2005. Browder has since been entangled in many conflicts with Russia, and its leader Vladimir Putin, for his attempts to fight the government's human rights abuses.
In 1998 Browder gave up his U.S. citizenship so he could avoid paying taxes to foreign investment. He did business in Russia for 10 years but was refused entry in 2005. He was instrumental in getting President Obama to sign into law the Magnitsky Act to punish Russian human rights violators. Bill Browder was tried in Russia and sentenced to nine years in prison but he was not arrested. He testified in 2017 to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about Russia's alleged interference in the U.S. presidential election of 2016.
Vladimir Putin Wealth Claims
Over the years, Bill Browder has been one of the most vocal critics of Vladimir Putin. He has been especially critical of the massive personal wealth purportedly that Putin has amassed at the expense of the Russian people. In a number of interviews over the years, Browder has loudly proclaimed that he believes Vladimir Putin is secretly the richest person in the world.
One of Browder's first claims about Putin's wealth was made in a February 2015 CNN interview. When asked by interviewer Fareed Zakaria to estimate Vladimir Putin's net worth, Browder replied:
"I believe that it's $200 billion. After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn't been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank–Swiss bank accounts–shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies."
Elaborating…
"The first eight or 10 years of Putin's reign over Russia, it was about stealing as much money as he could. And some people, including myself, believe that he's the richest man in the world…with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth that was stolen from Russia."
Early Life and Education
Bill Browder was born on April 23, 1964 in Princeton, New Jersey and was raised in Chicago, Illinois. He is the son of Felix Browder, the renowned mathematician, and the grandson of Earl Browder, who spied for the Soviet Union and headed the Communist Party in the United States from 1930 to 1945. Bill Browder has a brother named Tom who became a particle physicist.
For his higher education, Browder first attended the University of Colorado, Boulder before transferring to the University of Chicago, where his father had chaired the mathematics department. He graduated from U of C with a BS degree in economics. Browder went on to earn his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1989.
Career Beginnings
After graduating from Stanford, Browder joined the financial sector. He got his start in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group in London, England. After that, Browder worked for Robert Maxwell's MCC conglomeration, and then managed the Russian proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers. In 1998, he relinquished his American citizenship, and the following year became a naturalized British citizen.
Hermitage Capital Management
In 1996, Browder co-founded the investment fund and asset management company Hermitage Capital Management with Edmond Safra. The aim was to invest an initial seed capital of $25 million in Russian companies during the country's post-Soviet era of mass privatization. Browder went on to use Hermitage for the purposes of shareholder activism, taking on a number of large Russian companies such as Gazprom, Sidanco, Avisma, and Surgutneftegas. In these companies, he exposed corporate malfeasance at the highest levels of management. From 1996 to 2006, Hermitage Capital Management was among the biggest international investors in Russia.
Conflicts with the Russian Government
In retaliation for his shareholder activism via Hermitage Capital Management, Browder was refused entry to Russia in late 2005, and was deported to the UK while designated as a Russian national security threat. In mid-2007, Hermitage Capital's offices in Moscow were raided by officers of Russia's Interior Ministry; the Moscow office of Browder's American law firm was also raided. Browder subsequently assigned his attorney Sergei Magnitsky to investigate. What Magnitsky found was that the documents that were seized in the raid had been used to fraudulently re-register Hermitage's holding companies under the name of an ex-convict. Magnitsky was arrested by Russian authorities for his role in exposing the corruption, and died in prison.
Following the death of Magnitsky, Browder lobbied for the US Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act to punish Russian abusers of human rights. The Act was signed into law by Barack Obama in 2012. The next year, both Browder and the late Magnitsky were tried in absentia in Russia for tax fraud, and were convicted and sentenced to prison. However, Interpol rejected Russian requests to arrest Browder, arguing that it was politically motivated. Over the subsequent years, Interpol continued to reject requests by the Russian government to place Browder on the arrest list of criminal fugitives. On a visit to Spain in 2018, Browder was arrested by Spanish authorities on a new Russian Interpol warrant. After being held in a Spanish police station for two hours, he was released.
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Books
Browder has authored some books about his experiences dealing with Russian government corruption. In early 2015, he published "Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice." Browder later penned "Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath," which was published in 2022.
Honors and Awards
Browder has received numerous awards and honors over the years for his political activism, leadership, and contributions to finance. In 2018, he won the Aspen Institute Henry Crown Leadership Award and the Coalition for Integrity's Integrity Award. The following year, Browder was the recipient of the American Spirit Award for Citizen Activism and the Lantos Human Rights Prize. Among his other accolades, he received Trinity College Dublin's Trinity SMF Award for his work in finance.
Personal Life
With his wife, Russian businesswoman Elena, Browder has three children. One of his children, Joshua, is the founder of the online legal service and chatbot DoNotPay, which claims to use artificial intelligence to provide legal counsel.
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