Down to the Last 100M...but Doing Fine

Twelve months ago , Moscow overtook New York as the billionaire capital of the world, with 74 tycoons to New York's 71. Today there are 27 in Moscow and 55 in New York. Now Russia has less billionaires (Forbes.com) and it has certainly changed certain mood states for the remaining bunch.

Yet, you are still far from being poor once you have dropped from being a billionaire to a mere millionaire. For Russians it is just a travel along the “toilet paper route”. In the 80s, we had only one or two plants in the USSR that produced toilet paper. So most of the population had to re-use newspaper as toilet paper, if they hadn’t had a chance to buy a low-quality one-layer Soviet-made toilet paper proper (4 layers to 2 layers TP). In the early 1990s, we moved up a notch and saw in our stores 2-layered toilet paper made in Poland. By the 2000s, everybody could afford 4-layered, colored, flavored toilet paper. The current crisis means that figuratively speaking, that we have to move from 4 layers down to 2 layers, but we are still a long way to go back to recycling newspaper.

Something similar happens to the very rich Russians currently – they find themselves forced to tier down in their consumption habits but on a different scale. But we want to highlight here that in Russia everybody remembers how it feels to be quite poor.

One of the Russian tycoons understands that. But he also believes that moving up is as easy as moving down this scale in Russia. He built his estates for the very rich in the middle of the generally poor and unkempt landscapes on the outskirts of Moscow. “Agalarov believes that as it is possible to become extremely rich in a short amount of time in Russia, so it is not such a tragedy in that culture to lose one’s wealth. And poverty isn't far away from the Agalarov Estates, trees have been planted close to the new estate to mask the rundown village nearby. Many of its inhabitants gave up their homes, succumbing to hefty cash offers, according to Sky's report.”

This is what Agalarov Estates look like:

And this is what is hidden by the face around this estate:

So losing some of the riches is not seen by the Russian tycoons as that much of a tragedy so far.

Insight: When you make so much money so fast you treat them as easy come, easy go. Some of the emotional attachment and joy disappears after a certain order of digits in your bank account.

- Ilia