Leonid Mikhelson
Russian businessman
Leonid Viktorovich Mikhelson (Russian: Леони́д Ви́кторович Михельсо́н; born 11 August 1955) is a Russian-Israeli billionaire oligarch, businessman, CEO, chairman and major shareholder of the Russian gas company Novatek.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhelson obtained a stake in a privatized pipeline construction company out of which he formed Novatek. He is a business partner of Russian billionaire Gennady Timchenko, a close confidante of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mikhelson had a net worth of US$24.8 billion as of 24 August 2026, making him the 103rd richest person in the world and the second richest in Russia. In the 2026 Forbes annual billionaires ranking, he was ranked 88th in the world and fourth in Russia, with an estimated net worth of US$28.3 billion.
Biography
Born to an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Russian mother, Mikhelson began his career as an engineer after graduating with a degree in Industrial Civil Engineering from the Samara Institute of Civil Engineering in 1977. He started working as a foreman at a construction and assembling company in the Tyumen area of Siberia. One of his initial projects was work on the Urengoi-Chelyabinsk gas pipeline. In 1985, he was appointed as Chief Engineer of Ryazantruboprovodstroy. In 1987, he became General Director of Kuibishevtruboprovodstroy, which, in 1991, was one of the first companies to undergo privatization after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leonid Mikhelson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.