# 114 Vagit Alekperov $23.1B

The majority of Alekperov's fortune is derived from a 28.3% stake in Lukoil, a publicly traded oil and gas company. A regular buyer of Lukoil stock since the 1990s, Alekperov has spent about $4 billion buying shares since the IPO using proceeds from dividends and asset sales as well as debt. Lukoil employs more than 100,000 people and accounts for 2% of the world's oil production, according to the company's website.

Alekperov has a 28.3% stake in the Moscow-based business, based on its 2020 annual report. The report says he owns the shares directly and indirectly, without providing further information on how they are held. In April 2022, a week after Alekperov was sanctioned by the UK, Lukoil said in a statement that the billionaire owns, directly or indirectly, 8.6% of the company without elaborating on what happened to the rest of his interest. The full 28.3% stake remains credited to him in this analysis to reflect his status as the founder and key investor.

The imposition of US sanctions on the Moscow Stock Exchange in June 2024 led to a change in the valuation methodology used in this analysis. The company is now valued using reported financial results and the average enterprise value-to-sales multiple of four publicly traded peers: BP PLC, Repsol SA, Equinor ASA and Galp Energia SGPS SA.

Cash holdings are based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance. They were updated on Feb. 13, 2025 to reflect the performance of a Russia inflation index.

Alekperov, the youngest of five children, was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1950. His father, an oil worker, died when he was 3 years old, and he himself became an oil driller when he was 22. He studied engineering in the evenings at the Azerbaijan Institute of Oil and Chemistry and graduated in 1974.

Five years later, he moved to West Siberia, where he worked in a series of senior positions for the Surgutneftegaz and Bashneft oil companies. In 1987, he was put in charge of Kogalymneftegaz, a company operating in Russia's oil-rich Tyumen region.

Alekperov was named deputy at age 40, and then first deputy minister of Russia's oil and gas industry. In 1990, at the invitation of British Petroleum, he led a Russian delegation of oilmen to the UK, where he became enamored with BP's vertical business model, which integrated development, production and distribution. As the Soviet Union began to crumble, Alekperov became head of a newly created state oil entity that oversaw oil and gas properties in West Siberia. The company was renamed Lukoil and, with Alekperov at the helm, was partly privatized in 1993. His stake was first reported as 10% when Lukoil was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2002, and as 16.9% in 2007, in accordance with UK Financial Services Authority rules. The state sold all of its shares in the company by 2004.

Alekperov has been accumulating shares in Lukoil since the 1990s, and today owns more than 20 percent. Under his control, the company has expanded beyond Russia and into regions including Iraq and the US. In 1997, Lukoil secured the rights to develop an oilfield from Saddam Hussein and in 2000 it bought Getty Petroleum Marketing along with its network of 1,300 US service stations. Today Lukoil is Russia's largest non-state oil company. With expanding operations in Latin America and Asia, the company's production output may approach that of Royal Dutch Shell, Europe's largest oil outfit, in the next decade.

A Communist Party member in the former Soviet Union, Alekperov was one of the businessmen who supported Boris Yeltsin's 1996 presidential campaign. He has maintained his ties with Russia's new leadership. While other privatized Russian oil companies -- including Roman Abramovich's Sibneft and Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos -- fell back into government hands, Alekperov's Lukoil has remained independent.