Forbes Includes Ruben Vardanyan, Eduardo Ernekian, Kim Kardashian in 2025 Billionaires List
NEW YORK — Eight Armenians are named among the Forbes list of billionaires. The list includes a record number of billionaires – 3,028 with aggregate fortune estimated at $16 trillion.
The six Armenian billionaires are:
Albert Avdolyan – 717th place, fortune $5 billion
He owns Far Eastern and Siberian coal mining and gas companies. He received investment capital from the sale of stakes in Russian telecommunications companies Megafon and Yota. He is a major shareholder in a company that holds a coal mining license near Russia’s largest Elga basin (proven coke reserves are estimated at 2 billion tons).
In 2022, he began construction of a private railroad from the coal fields of Yakutia to a future port on the Sea of Okhotsk, the Pacific Railroad. Its length is about 500 kilometers.
Eduardo Ernekian – 1,072nd place, $3.4 billion fortune
The son of Armenian immigrants in Argentina, he first worked in the textile industry. In the 1980s, he got into cable television. In the 1990s, he earned $750 million from the sale of Cablevision, an Argentine television company. As part of his Corporacion America Corporation, Ernekian and his partners own 52 airports around the world with reported revenue of $1.4 billion.
In February 2018, Corporacion America Airports went public on the New York Stock Exchange; its CEO is his nephew Martin Ernekian.
Another of his companies, Compañía General de Combustibles, is an oil and gas producer in Argentina that operates hydrocarbon fields and pipelines.
Samvel Karapetyan – 1,141st place, $3.2 billion
He owns Tashir Holding, a commercial real estate development company. Karapetyan was born in Armenia, but came to Russia in the 1990s and settled in Kaluga. A longtime subcontractor of Gazprom, Tashir GC also has state contracts for lighting Moscow’s central streets. Karapetyan’s children Sarkis and daughter Tatevik are top managers of Tashir. Karapetyan has built shopping centers, bought an electricity company and one of the largest power plants in Armenia.
Andrey Andreyev (Oganjanov) – ranked 1,688th, fortune $2.1 billion
A Russian entrepreneur, he has created five online dating sites and apps since 2004: Mamba, Badoo, Bumble, Chappy and Lumen. His most successful app in the US is Bumble, co-created with Whitney Wolfe Herd. In November 2019, Andreev sold his controlling stake in Bumble and Badoo to Blackstone Group in a deal that valued the sites at $3 billion. In August 2020, Andreev launched Stereo, an audio-only social media platform that competes with Clubhouse, another audio app. Andreev got his start in the 1990s by building and selling several startups, including SpyLog, which tracked visitors to websites.
Kim Kardashian – 2,019th ranking, $1.7 billion
She went from being a reality TV star to owning a ten-figure fortune, much of it from her stake in the corrective underwear company Skims. Skims is valued at $4 billion after a 2023 funding round. Its investors include billionaires Stephen Mandel, Daniel Sandheim and Josh Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s brother-in-law.
In 2020, Kardashian sold 20 percent of her cosmetics and perfume company KKW Beauty to Coty for $200 million. Kardashian closed the brand in 2021 and in June 2022 launched SKKN By Kim, a line of high-end skincare products. Kardashian divorced musician Kanye West in early 2022. They share custody of their four children, and Kardashian reportedly paid $23 million to keep her Axel Vervoordt-designed Hidden Hills mansion.
Artem Khachatryan – ranked 2,110th, fortune $1.6 billion
Together with billionaire Sergei Lomakin, they co-founded Russian discount retailer Fix Price in 2007. The company went public in 2021. The chain has opened more than 4,000 stores in Russia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Belarus, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Previously Khachatryan was an executive director of the company, in December 2023 Khachatryan sold his entire stake in FixPrice and resigned from the board of directors, citing family reasons.
Nubar Afeyan – ranked 2,623rd, fortune $1.2 billion
He is the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a natural science innovation company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also chairman and co-founder of Moderna, a biotech firm known for its Covid-19 vaccine, which was approved by the U.S. FDA in December 2020. During his career, Afeyan has helped found more than 70 public and private companies in the healthcare and life sciences industries.
He was born in 1962 to Armenian parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He and his family fled the Lebanese civil war and moved to Montreal in 1975. In addition to his stake in Moderna, he also owns shares in more than a dozen publicly traded biotech companies in the US.
Ruben Vardanyan – ranked 2,623rd, fortune $1.2 billion
Known as the founder of the Russian stock market, Vardanyan co-founded the investment company Troika Dialog in the early 1990s. In 2013, Vardanyan and his managers sold Troika Dialog to state-owned Sberbank for $1.4 billion. In 2014, Vardanyan founded Vardanyan, Broitman & Partners, an investment boutique that caters to the very wealthy.
