"It is his outsiderness that seems most irritating and even alarming" - that's the main issue that people seem to be having with Yuri. If he was American, he would be yet another success story, flashier than the others, but still competent enough to have made it big.<p>As much as I admire the Silicon Valley investors who live in a normal house and drive a normal car, it's Milner's choice to go all out and get some expensive stuff if he wants - I suspect growing up in Russia, they didn't have access to any kind of luxury items when the Union collapsed, so the desire to get all the big houses, yachts and expensive cars is understandable.<p>By the way, I like it how he bought Mail.ru when it was cheap - it was certainly a smart investment (it's now the biggest mail service in Runet, not only Russia itself), at a time when most of them thought the fancy American invention, the Internet, went belly up.
If there's one mistake this story makes, it's in trying to come up with complicated theories about why Yuri does well. He's simply smart. That's what DST has in common with Andreessen Horowitz, though they have little else in common.
The wealth in hands of all these xUSSR oligarchs (Usmanov etc) was once a social wealth of all Soviet people. It is nice to see this wealth is now being converted 'back to social'. Our Facebook accounts are supposedly worth $100+ already, so it seems like a very clever plot to pay these money back to where they belong. Let's hope Mark will provide payouts for those choosing to close their accounts.
pg is extremely naive if he thinks the this guy's money is not tainted. Actually, it does not take a genius to figure this out. IT IT IMPOSSIBLE to make that kind of money in Russia by playing according to the rules.
Why not anybody thought that what Milner does is he paves the road to even more money coming from legit and not-so-legit investments from Russian oligarchs. Once Milner gets settled in the SV and proves his operations are successful, then Russian money will start flowing in in amounts that's hard to comprehend.<p>Why is this desirable for oligarchs? Simple: businesses in Russia are profoundly insecure - remember Khodorkovsky? So, Milner will find a great amount of willing investors among the second-tier oligarchs once he's ready to start doing money heavy lifting.<p>And when you pave the road that will go "pay-to-pass" you can spend few unnecessarily billions.
The story angle is wrong. Why would someone like him care if he bought into anything, when he can buy everything. It reads like an insecure fable which I doubt.
The man is making people's dreams come true and taking chances on young and hungry entrepreneurs, legally. Some of you make it sound as if he's a murderer. Leave him alone and let him and all the companies he's funding be great.