Patrick Radden Keefe

This generation of pretty rapacious post-Soviet businessmen who acquired enormous amounts of capital very, very quickly.

It's interesting.

I think the collapse of the Soviet Union was kind of a sort of an ideal place if you were morally unscrupulous to make a fortune quickly.

You could just seize all those state-held assets in oil and gas and that was that.

Yeah, which is what these guys did.

And just a handful of people.

I mean, there's a quote in the book from one of these oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky, saying at a certain point that he and six other men control 50% of the wealth of all of the former USSR.

And the thing is that once they had those fortunes, it was a very insecure place to stay.

You wouldn't want to keep your billions in Moscow.

Yes, and London was happy to take it and introduced, it's funny because my country, you know, the Trump administration and its infinite wisdom is now rolling out a golden visa program.

And Britain did that two decades ago in part to attract these kinds of people.

You know, this wasn't a subtle thing.

Boris Johnson, when he was mayor of London before becoming prime minister,

He said, London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan.

We are their natural habitat and we're proud of that.

You know, initially, he starts small.

He's got these kind of little entrepreneurial hustles at school.

He's selling clothing and sneakers on the Internet.

And then he starts to befriend these older businessmen.

And to start telling his parents about bigger ventures.