Alexey Mordashov and his family are ranked No. 57 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $37 billion. He is the main shareholder and chairman of Severstal, Russia’s largest steel and mining company, and is under sanctions.
Alexey Alexandrovich Mordashov was born on September 26, 1965. He is the son of two steel mill workers in Cherepovets, where his father was an electrical engineer at the mill. He has said his family relied on welfare coupons that allowed only small monthly amounts of butter and sausage.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 57, with $37 billion; Forbes noted that he returned to the top spot among Russia’s richest for the first time since 2021
- Bloomberg: on August 24, 2026, its index put him at $29.1 billion, 86th in the world and first in Russia, according to Wikipedia
Education and Career
Mordashov earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from the Leningrad Engineering-Economical Institute and an MBA from Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2001. He began his career at the Cherepovets steel plant where his parents had worked, and later became the main shareholder and chairman of Severstal. In autumn 2007 he bought shares in the travel group TUI Travel.
Sanctions and Controversies
- Sanctions: he is under sanctions because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the European Union has described Rossiya Bank, in which he owns a financial stake, as the “personal bank” of senior officials who benefited from the 2014 annexation of Crimea
- Leaks: he was mentioned in the Panama Papers and FinCEN files, which reported that a company associated with him paid for some of Vladimir Putin’s pet projects; in November 2023 the New York Times, drawing on the Cyprus Confidential leak, reported that accounts connected to him paid the German author Hubert Seipel to write a book about Putin
Personal Life
By 2001 he had married his second wife, Elena, and had two more sons, Kirill and Nikita.
Why It Matters
Severstal is one of Russia’s biggest industrial groups, and Mordashov’s fortune is closely tied to the Russian economy and to the sanctions imposed on it.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Alexey Mordashov (left) at a meeting in March 2011. Photo: Premier.gov.ru / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
