Four people from Ukraine made it onto Forbes’ prestigious list of the richest immigrants in the US, which put Ukraine in the top ten countries for the number of immigrant billionaires.
In total, this year’s Forbes ranking includes 125 billionaires born abroad who currently reside in the US — a record number representing 41 countries.
The richest immigrants
The top three richest immigrants are as follows:
- Elon Musk (South Africa, $393.1 billion, founder of Tesla, SpaceX),
- Sergey Brin (Russia, $139.7 billion, co-founder of Google),
- Jensen Huang (Taiwan, $137.9 billion, co-founder of Nvidia).
Ukrainian billionaire immigrants
Four Ukrainians are on the list of the richest immigrants in the US:
- Jan Koum (9th place, $16.9 billion): Co-founder of WhatsApp. After selling WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for $22 billion, Koum stepped down as CEO in 2018. He currently invests through his firm, Newlands, which owns nearly 10 million shares of Meta and supports startups.
- Leonid Radwinsky (50th place, $3.8 billion): Owner of OnlyFans, a popular platform for online creators. Born in Ukraine. While still a student, he founded a referral business in the adult entertainment industry. In 2018, Radwinsky acquired a stake in OnlyFans from the British Stockley family, who founded the company in 2016.
OnlyFans reported revenue of $1.3 billion in 2023, when users spent a record $6.6 billion on the platform. Radwinsky paid himself $1.1 billion in dividends from 2021 to 2023.
- Michael Polsky (75th place, $2.5 billion): Founder and CEO of Invenergy LLC. His company develops renewable energy projects, including plans to build 1,000 wind turbines in Kansas and an 800-mile power line worth $7 billion.
Invenergy owns more than 10,000 megawatts of capacity, of which nearly 7,000 are wind turbines. In 2001, he sold the SkyGen gas generator to Calpine for $450 million.
- Max Levchin (85th place, $2.1 billion): Co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Affirm Holdings, a fintech company that offers installment loans for purchases. Levchin is also the co-founder of the gaming company Slide and the fertility tracking app Glow.
He owns nearly 11% of Affirm, which had a market value of $24 billion as of January 2021 and $11 billion as of the beginning of March 2024.
