Yuri Milner

Yuri Milner was born in 1961 in Moscow

Milner was born in Moscow in 1961 to a Jewish family, the second child of Soviet intellectuals. His father worked at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and his mother worked at a state virology laboratory. His older sister is an architect.

He studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University and graduated in 1985. He then worked at the Lebedev Physical Institute, where he befriended Andrei Sakharov. In 1990 he went to the United States to earn an MBA at the Wharton School.

After Wharton he worked at the World Bank in Washington, then held senior posts at Menatep Bank until 1998. In 1999 he decided to build an Internet company, and his firm netBridge merged with Port.ru in 2001 to form Mail.Ru, which he led as CEO. In 2005 he founded Digital Sky Technologies, which became Mail.ru Group and listed in London in 2010.

Through DST he invested $200 million in Facebook in 2009 and later invested in companies such as Twitter, Spotify and Xiaomi. He left the Mail.ru board in 2012. In 2021 he invested in Altos Labs, a company working on aging research.

Milner became an Israeli citizen in 1999, moved to Israel in 2005 and relocated to California in 2014. In 2018 the US Treasury included him on a list of Russian oligarchs. In 2022 he renounced his Russian citizenship after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He is married to Julia Milner.