Len Blavatnik, a business tycoon and philanthropist of Ukrainian Jewish descent, was born on June 14, 1957, in Odesa, Soviet Ukraine. Blavatnik was ranked as the 20th richest person in the world by Forbes as of March 2022, with a net worth of $35.4 billion. For his contributions to philanthropy, Blavatnik was knighted in 2017.
In the turbulent privatisation of state-owned aluminium and oil enterprises that took place after the fall of the Soviet Union, Blavatnik amassed his wealth. By way of his business Access Industries Holding, he owns the majority of Warner Music Group and has investments in a number of publicly-traded businesses.
Len Blavatnik Bio/Wiki
Birth Name | Leonard Valentinovich Blavatnik |
Nick Name | Len Blavatnik |
Age | 66 years |
Religion | Jewish |
Sun Sign/Zodiac Sign | Cancer |
Birth Place | Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union |
Date of Birth | June 14 1957 |
Nationality | British and American |
Hobbies | Reading |
Family |
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Mother’s Name | N.A |
Father’s Name | N.A |
Brother | Alexander Blavatnik |
Sister | None |
Girlfriends/Affairs |
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Affairs/Girlfriends | None |
Marital Status, Wife and Children |
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Wife/Spouse | |
Marital Status | Married |
Children | 5 Children, |
Education |
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School | Moscow State University of Railway Engineering |
College/University | Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science ,Harvard Business School |
Profession | Film Producer, Entrepreneur and Financer |
Height, Weight, and Figure Measurements |
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Height (Approx.) | 179cm |
Weight (Approx.) | 86 |
Extra Ordinary Features |
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Race / Ethnicity | Jewish |
Hair Color | Brown |
Eye Color | Brown |
S*xual Orientation | Straight |
Favourite Things |
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Favourite Food | Italian Cuisine |
Favourite Book | NA |
Favourite Colors | Reddish-Brown |
Favourite Sport | Football |
Controversies | None |
Early Life
Len Blavatnik, also known by her family name Sir Leonard Valentinovich Blavatnik, is a well-known British investor, businessman, and philanthropist who was born in France. Len Blavatnik began his professional life as a born British businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He was born in France on June 14, 1957.
At the age of 65, he belongs to a group of well-known British businessmen, investors, and philanthropists. We advise you to review the whole list of eminent British capitalists, businessmen, and benefactors. The family’s desire for emigration visas prevented him from finishing his studies at the Moscow State University of Railway Engineering. In 1978, he and his family left the Soviet Union for the United States of America.
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Len Blavatnik Education
He had been dreaming of becoming a billionaire and a smart person since the beginning. In 1989, he graduated from Columbia College with a master’s in computer science and from Harvard Business School with an MBA. The writings started when he grew more wealthy in a short period of time, therefore we know very little about his early life.
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Personal Life
The spouse of Blavatnik is Emily Appelson Blavatnik. Laila, the couple’s daughter, is one of their four children.
Blavatnik is close friends with Trump supporters and former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Viktor Vekselberg, one of Russia’s wealthiest men and a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as a few other Russia-related oligarchs who are subject to Western sanctions for their support of totalitarian regimes and illegal activities, are well-known friends and business partners of Blavatnik.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump supporter Blavatnik are friends.
In addition, Viktor Vekselberg, one of Russia’s richest men and a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and some other oligarchs associated with Russia who are subject to Western sanctions for their support of totalitarian regimes and criminal activities are longtime friends and business partners of Blavatnik. American and British citizenship is held by Len Blavatnik.
Professional Career
Blavatnik established Access Industries Holdings, a holding company, in 1986. He currently serves as chairman and president of the company. The New York-based company, dubbed a “sprawling multinational,” owns 21% of LyondellBasell, the largest polypropylene producer in the world. Blavatnik owns the majority of Warner Music Group through Access Industries Holding and has investments in a number of publicly-traded companies.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Blavatnik acquired former state properties that the Russian government had privatised. By acquiring stakes in aluminium smelters during the era of privatisation that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, Blavatnik started his commercial career. He accomplished this through Access Industries, his holding firm. According to reports, he emerged victorious from Russia’s “aluminium wars.” Through the purchase of these goods, Blavatnik amassed his money.
Saul, one of his ventures, later joined United Company Rusal, the biggest producer of aluminium in the world. From 2007 through 2016, Len Blavatnik served on the Rusal board of directors. The company also made investments in local power plants, which they used to provide their energy-demanding aluminium enterprises with electricity. In Kazakhstan, they acquired a coal mine in 1996.
Blavatnik Access Industries merged with Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Group, Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova Corp, and the business AAR in 1997. (Alfa, Access, Renova). Serving as a liaison between the group and western corporations like British Petroleum was Blavatnik’s primary responsibility. In the middle of the 1990s, the well-connected Fridman was a part of Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle. AAR’s first task was to pay $800 million to acquire 40% of the faltering oil firm Tyumen Oil (TNK), which was in need of cash.
TNK was one of the few state-owned oil businesses still in operation. With parameters that perfectly fit AAR, Tyumen Oil was auctioned off. Despite placing a much higher bid than its rivals, AAR did not end up paying the agreed price. AAR apparently only contributed 25% of the total. Then TNK began a buying binge, settling on the oil company Sidanco, which was partially held by British Petroleum, a major oil company in the United Kingdom. Through bankruptcy procedures, TNK purchased Sidanco’s finest assets in 1999.
For its 50% ownership of TNK-BP, the Russian oil major Rosneft paid AAR $28 billion in cash in 2013. They initially put $8 billion worth of assets into the venture. AAR has already received $19 billion in dividends from the joint venture up to this time. The sale marked the majority of Blavatnik’s Russian assets being liquidated.
In 1999, Len Blavatnik tried to acquire Chernogorneft, a rival oil company that was being auctioned off inexplicably at the time. Despite the fact that Chernogorneft had produced $1.2 billion worth of oil the year prior, Blavatnik’s TNK business paid $180 million to acquire the company.
Access Industries paid Royal Dutch Shell and BASF $5.7 billion in August 2005 to acquire Basell Polyolefins, a producer of plastics and petrochemicals. On December 20, 2007, Basell successfully completed the acquisition of Lyondell Chemical Company for an estimated $19 billion in enterprise value. Based on net sales, the resulting firm, LyondellBasell Industries, rose to the eighth-largest chemical corporation in the world. The LyondellBasell Industries U.S. business filed for bankruptcy on January 6, 2009.
At the end of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on April 30, 2010, LyondellBasell had much better financial standing. LyondellBasell raised $2.8 billion through rights offering co-underwritten by Access Industries, Apollo Management, and Ares Management as well as $3.25 billion in first priority debt as part of its exit financing. The price of LyondellBasell shares has climbed by 103% since April 2010. Currently, Access holds almost 14% of LyondellBasell.
After allegedly following Morgan’s advice to purchase mortgage securities with AAA credit ratings three years earlier and losing $100 million as a result, Blavatnik sued JPMorgan Chase in 2010 for damages. The New York State Supreme Court ordered JPMorgan Chase to pay $50 million in damages to Blavatnik in 2013. Blavatnik at the time stated to the New York Times: “These kinds of suits are useless for the little guy. I have a lot of money. I’ll put everything it takes into it.”
Access Industries invested €100 million in the music streaming service Deezer in 2012. Access purchased Perform Group in 2014 at £702 million. Its competitors included IMG of the United States and Sportsman Media Group of Germany. Access Entertainment, which Blavatnik founded in 2016, acquired James Packer’s interest in RatPac Entertainment in 2017 along with a 24.9 per cent investment in Bad Wolf.
In 2017, Blatvatnik was mentioned as a potential buyer for the Time Inc. publisher. Together with Edgar “Ed” Bronfman Jr., the former president and CEO of Warner Music, Blavatnik prepared the bid. In March 2017, Bronfman and Blavatnik abandoned the transaction due to valuation problems.
According to a report from April 2018, Blavatnik was the front-runner in the competition to buy the Theatre Royal Haymarket, the third-oldest theatre in Britain. Approximately £40 million was the bid, according to sources. The Theatre Royal Haymarket was finally acquired by Blavatnik’s Access Entertainment in June 2018.
Additionally, Blavatnik is the owner of AI Film, an independent film and production firm that supported Lee Daniels’ films The Butler and Mr Holmes, which debuted in the summer of 2015. He helped finance fashion designer Tory Burch and was an early investor in Beats Music and Rocket Internet. In 2013, he spent $115 million to purchase a cellular spectrum in Norway.
Since 2014, when Access Industries raised its ownership of the company from 42.5 per cent to 77 per cent, Blavatnik has been the sole owner of DAZN Group.
The “Netflix of sports” has been said to be DAZN (pronounced “da zone”). The business is a component of Perform Group, a sports media corporation with a base in the UK that is controlled by Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries. Outside of its home countries, DAZN specialises in purchasing the rights to broadcast sports like football, boxing, and Formula 1 racing. The country of Japan, Germany, and Canada all offer sports streaming services.
To stream matches on a new U.S. subscription service, DAZN and Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing agreed to an eight-year, $1 billion contracts in May 2018.
Italian Serie A football matches’ domestic airing rights were purchased by DAZN in June 2018 for €600 million over a three-year period. Over the course of the contract’s three seasons, payments totalling 2.5 billion euros ($3 billion) were reportedly involved.
In October 2018, DAZN paid Mexican boxer Saul “Canelo” Alvarez $365 million for the right to broadcast 11 fights, making it the richest commercial agreement ever made with a single athlete. For £265 million, Access Industries acquired the mobile phone technology firm Acision in 2007 from the IT Group Logica. The third-largest telecom business in Norway, Ice Group, was controlled by Access Industries to the tune of 60% as of 2018.
Blavatnik is a member of the Harvard Business School Dean’s Advisory Board, the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, the academic board at Tel Aviv University, and the global advisory board of the Cambridge University Center for International Business Management.
Donations
The largest gift in the gallery’s history was made by Blavatnik in 2011 when he gave more than £50 million to the Tate Modern in London. The Blavatnik Building was the name given to the gallery’s new $266 million addition in 2017.
In 2013, Harvard University announced a $50 million gift from Blavatnik’s foundation to support the creation of the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator and promote life sciences entrepreneurship at the university. The university also announced the first five HBS graduates to receive the Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship. In cooperation with the New York Academy of Sciences, Blavatnik also announced three $250,000 national prizes for young scientists, with a 42-year-old age restriction. At the time, Blavatnik stated to the media:
“The Nobel Prize is worth around $1 million, but I felt that $250,000 was a sufficient amount to make it fascinating without becoming unsettling. For seasoned researchers, there are plenty of incentives, but I don’t believe that young researchers consistently receive adequate support and encouragement.” New York City’s Carnegie Hall appointed Blavatnik as a trustee in 2014.
The Blavatnik family foundation gave $25 million to Carnegie Hall in 2016. As a result, Carnegie Hall changed the name of the first tier of its box seats to “The Blavatnik Family First Tier.” The Blavatnik name will be on the boxes until 2066. A new hall at the Victoria & Albert Museum renovation was funded in 2016 by Blavatnik.
In 2016, Blavatnik provided financial backing for the $1.2 billion transformations of a dilapidated part of Miami’s South Beach into a hub for the arts and culture. The Damien Hirst project named “Gone But Not Forgotten” was lent by Blavatnik. The piece consists of a vitrine housing a mammoth skeleton that has been 10,000 years old and has been gold-plated.
Blavatnik’s Foundation made a $200 million gift to Harvard Medical School in 2018 to support research, data science initiatives, and the development of subsidised lab space for biotech businesses.
The Blavatnik Foundation has given money to Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science to support engineering advancements in healthcare. Additionally, the institution awarded him the 2017, Samuel Johnson Medal.
Access announced a $100 million fund in June 2020 to promote “charitable causes relating to the music industry, social justice, and campaigns against violence and prejudice,” backed by the Blavatnik family foundation, on the day of the Warner initial public offering.
Blavatnik contributed £10 million to the Courtauld Institute of Art’s redevelopment in December 2020.
Half of the £15 million needed to stop the Honresfield Library from being sold and distributed on the free market was given by Blavatnik in December 2021. The Bront family documents, letters from Jane Austen, and handwritten Robert Burns poetry are all included in the collection, which was assembled by Lancashire industrialists William and Alfred Law.
Blavatnik donated millions of pounds to the Imperial War Museum in London in February 2022. The Blavatnik Art, Film, and Photography Galleries will be founded with the aid of funding.
Len Blavatnik Political Donations
Both President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, received donations from Blavatnik in 2011.
One of the biggest contributors to the US Republican Party, Blavatnik is linked to Russian oligarchs like Viktor Vekselberg and Oleg Deripaska. In 2015-2016, he gave a total of $7.35 million to six Republican candidates, including Senators John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida.
Blavatnik made a $1 million donation to a Republican organisation opposed to Donald Trump in February 2016. Additionally, he gave $1 million to the Donald Trump inaugural committee. Bo Rothstein, a political scientist, left the Blavatnik School of Government in August 2017 after becoming disenchanted with Blavatnik’s political stance.
Additionally, Blavatnik and his American wife Emily gave money to Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Kamala Harris, all Democratic Party candidates. After two high-ranking members of the Trump administration were publicly identified as lobbyists for Blavatnik’s Access Industries in 2017, Blavatnik was brought up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiries into Russian contributions to the government.
Blavatnik has given $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and $383,000 to the Republican National Committee since April 2016. He didn’t donate money directly to the Trump campaign, though. Blavatnik gave Mitch McConnell, the head of the Republican Senate, $3.5 million between 2015 and 2017. Blavatnik contributed $5,200 to Pete Buttigieg’s and $5,600 to Joe Biden’s presidential campaigns in 2020.
Len Blavatnik Net Worth
Businessman Len Blavatnik, who is Ukrainian-American, has a $36.1 billion fortune. Len Blavatnik acquired his wealth through business ventures in coal, oil, real estate, and other areas, as well as through his participation on the boards of numerous corporations and educational institutions. In June 1957, Leonard Valentinovich Blavatnik was born in London, England.
Assets
On “the most expensive street in the world,” Kensington Palace Gardens, he is the owner of a Grade II listed structure at number 15, which is worth £200 million. He bought the lot in 2004 and can now live next to the Russian ambassador (who lives at number 13 on the block), in addition to owning a more than $250 million Manhattan home.
Estimated Net Worth in 2023 (Approx) | 36.1 billion |
Estimated Net Worth in 2022 (Approx) | 35,7 billion |
Estimated Net Worth in 2021 (Approx) | 32.5 billion |
Estimated Net Worth in 2020 (Approx) | 29.8 billion |
Annual Salary | >1.2 billion |
Assets |
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Houses | |
Yachts | |
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Len Blavatnik Awards
Blavatnik was elevated to the rank of chevalier in the French Legion d’Honneur in 2013. In the 2017 Birthday Honours, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his contributions to philanthropy.
On “the most expensive street in the world,” Kensington Palace Gardens, he is the owner of a Grade II listed structure at number 15, which is worth £200 million. He bought the lot in 2004 and can now live next to the Russian ambassador (who lives at number 13 on the block), in addition to owning a more than $250 million Manhattan home.
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FAQs
As of 2023, he has a net worth of approx $36.1 billion.
Emily Appelson
66 years
Film Producer