Fridman is the largest shareholder of Alfa Group, an investment company that owns stakes in X5, a Russian food retailer, and Rosvodokanal, a sewage company. Through Luxembourg-based LetterOne he owns stakes in oil and gas producer Harbour Energy and the international mobile-phone operator Veon.
The majority of Fridman's fortune is derived from Alfa Group, which has interests in banking and retail. He's the largest shareholder of the holding company, which he created and controls with two former college classmates, German Khan and Alexei Kuzmichev.
He sold his share of TNK-BP International, Russia's third-largest oil producer at the time, to state-run oil company Rosneft for $5.1 billion in March 2013. He collected about $3.3 billion in dividends from the venture between 2004 and 2012. He's also collected more than $1.6 billion from dividends and share sales of publicly traded companies, according to filings and an analysis of Bloomberg data. Cash investments were updated on Dec. 11, 2025 to reflect changes in underlying currency assumptions and this led to a decrease of about $5 billion.
He has stakes in three publicly traded companies, including 22% of X5, a food retailer; 22% of Veon, an international mobile phone operator; and 7.5% stake of Turkcell, a mobile phone company.
He also has investments in health-food retail chain Holland & Barrett as well as in Harbour Energy after BASF and LetterOne completed the sale of Wintershall Dea's exploration and production business excluding Russia-related activities to Harbour on September 2024.
The imposition of US sanctions on the Moscow Stock Exchange in June 2024 led to a change in the valuation methodology of X5 used in this analysis. The company is now valued using reported financial results and the average enterprise-value-to-Ebitda and price-to-sales multiples of four publicly traded peers: Carrefour SA, Distribuidora Internacional de Alimentacion SA, Colruyt Group N.V and Koninklijke Ahold Delhaize NV.
Fridman was sanctioned by the European Union and the UK in 2022, and by the US in 2023 over the escalating conflict in Ukraine.
Mikhail Fridman was born in Lviv, Ukraine, to a family of engineers, in 1964. Fridman's first forays into business were music-related. The billionaire, who performed with a band while in high school, ran a nightclub called Strawberry Fields while in college, and also made money scalping tickets outside Moscow theaters.
His other pre-banking ventures were equally varied. He set up a window-cleaning business in the late 1980s, and then teamed up with a couple of his college classmates, German Khan and Alexey Kuzmichev, to sell carpets and computers in the final years of the Soviet Union. As the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Fridman set up a commercial bank, Alfa Bank, which became the anchor business of Alfa Group, a holding company that today owns interests in telecommunications and retail. Fridman is the largest shareholder in Alfa Group.
Fridman has also made money from oil. In 1997, along with fellow businessmen Viktor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik, Fridman and his Alfa partners bought a 40 percent stake in TNK, a former state-owned oil company with interests in several West Siberian oil fields. Two years later, they acquired the most productive subsidiary of a competitor, Sidanco -- then partly-owned by BP -- that had been declared bankrupt by a commercial court in Siberia. John Browne, BP's then-CEO, later said the legal system was rigged.
By 2004, BP had paid almost $7 billion for half of TNK, while the other half was consolidated by Fridman and his partners under the holding company Alfa-Access-Renova. The investment formed TNK-BP, which has become Russia's largest foreign oil investment. In 2008, TNK-BP then-CEO Bob Dudley was forced to leave Russia after a strategy dispute.
Legal complications arose in 2011. AAR sued BP over a separate Arctic development deal it tried to strike with Rosneft. BP executives said that the company would sell its stake and Fridman stepped down from his role as CEO in May 2012. In October, Rosneft announced it would acquire the entire company. TNK-BP paid $38 billion in dividends through 2012. The billionaires sold their half of the venture to Russia's state-owned oil company, Rosneft, for $27.7 billion in March 2013.