Background and career
Sir William Felix Browder, (born 23 April 1964) is an American-born British financier and political activist. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, the investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund, which was formerly the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. The Hermitage Fund was founded in partnership with Republic National Bank, with $25 million in seed capital. The fund, and associated accounts, eventually grew to $4.5 billion of assets under management. In 1997, the Hermitage Fund was the best-performing fund in the world, up by 238%. Browder's primary investment strategy was shareholder rights activism. Browder took on large Russian companies, such as Gazprom, Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco. In retaliation, on 13 November 2005, Browder was refused entry to Russia, deported to the United Kingdom, and declared a threat to Russian national security. In June 2007, the Moscow offices of Hermitage Capital and of Browder's American law firm, Firestone Duncan, were raided by Russia's Interior Ministry. The corporate registration documents for Hermitage's investment holding companies were seized. Browder assigned Sergei Magnitsky, head of the tax practice at Firestone Duncan, to investigate the purpose of the raid. Magnitsky discovered that while those documents were in the custody of the police, they had been used to fraudulently re-register Hermitage's holding companies to the name of an ex-convict. Magnitsky was subsequently arrested by Russian authorities and died in prison. The reregistration of the Hermitage holding companies was an intermediate step before the perpetrators used those companies to apply for a fraudulent $230 million (~$344 million in 2025) tax refund, awarded on 24 December 2007. After Magnitsky's death, Browder lobbied for Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, a law to punish Russian human rights violators, which was signed into law in 2012 by President Barack Obama. In 2013, both Magnitsky and Browder were tried in absentia in Russia for tax fraud. Both men—Magnitsky had died four years prior—were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment. Interpol rejected Russian requests to arrest Browder, saying the case was political. In 2014, the European Parliament voted for sanctions against 32 Russians believed complicit in the Magnitsky case; this was the first time it had taken such action. On 21 October 2017, the Russian government attempted to place Browder on Interpol's arrest list of criminal fugitives, the fifth such request, which Interpol rejected on 26 October 2017. After the initial request, Browder's visa waiver for the United States was automatically suspended. After a bipartisan protest by U.S. Congressional leaders, his visa waiver was restored the following day. While visiting Spain in May 2018, Browder was arrested by Spanish authorities on a new Russian Interpol warrant and transferred to an undisclosed Spanish police station. He was released two hours later, after Interpol confirmed it was a political case. In June 2026, Bill's son Alexander Browder, aged 17, was also sanctioned by the Russian government after exposing a Kremlin-backed money laundering network used to help fund Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine.
William Felix Browder was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and he grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He is the son of mathematician Felix Browder, and the grandson of communist leader Earl Browder. He attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, before transferring to the University of Chicago, from which he graduated with a degree in economics. He earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1989 and entered the financial sector.
Browder's paternal grandfather, Earl Browder, was born in Kansas in 1891. He was a radical and had lived in the Soviet Union for several years from 1927 and married Raisa Berkman, a Jewish Russian woman, while living there. After his return to the U.S. in 1931, Earl Browder became the leader of the Communist Party USA from 1930 to 1945 and ran for U.S. president in 1936 and 1940. After World War II, Browder lost favour with Moscow and was expelled from the U.S. Communist Party. Earl and his wife Raisa had three children, all sons, and all three became mathematicians who headed the mathematics departments of top American universities, including Bill Browder's father, Felix Browder, who married Eva (Tislowitz). Felix was a mathematics prodigy who had entered MIT at 16, acquired his bachelor's degree in two years, and by the age of 20 received a Ph.D. from Princeton. Despite his intellectual and academic pedigree, Felix could not find academic work during the McCarthy era, as he was the son of the onetime head of the Communist Party USA. After a series of job rejections in the 1950s, he was championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady who was then chairman of the board of Brandeis University; she overrode the rest of the board who were afraid to hire him, and he gained a position at Brandeis. Felix went on to chair the mathematics department at the University of Chicago, and in 1999 became the president of the American Mathematical Society. Felix Browder was renowned in the field of nonlinear functional analysis—a branch of mathematics with wide applications to such fields as physics, engineering, and finance. He was instrumental in establishing a science and technology center in conjunction with Princeton University and Bell Labs. In 1999, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton, for his "key role in the explosive growth of nonlinear functional analysis and its applications to partial differential equations in recent years". Bill Browder has one sibling, Tom Browder, who entered the University of Chicago at 15, and became a particle physicist. Bill Browder's son Joshua is the founder of DoNotPay, a startup that helps to automate certain legal services; another son, Alexander Browder, is a financial crime researcher.
Browder started his career in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group in London, then worked for Robert Maxwell's Maxwell Communication Corporation, and after that managed the Russian proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers. In 1998, Browder became a British citizen and relinquished his U.S. citizenship. He cited that he did so because of "a legacy of bad feeling about the rule of law" as a result of his family having been "viciously persecuted" by U.S. authorities in the 1950s, citing especially his communist grandfather, Earl Browder, who was imprisoned twice during the era of McCarthyism.
Browder and Edmond Safra (1932–1999) founded Hermitage Capital Management in 1996 for the purpose of investing initial seed capital of $25 million in Russia during the period of the mass privatisation after the fall of the Soviet Union. Beny Steinmetz was another of the original investors in Hermitage. After the 1998 Russian financial crisis, Browder remained committed to Hermitage's original mission of investing in Russia, despite significant outflows from the fund. Hermitage became a prominent activist shareholder in the Russian gas giant Gazprom, the large oil company Surgutneftegas, RAO UES, Sberbank, Sidanco, Avisma, and Volzhanka. Browder exposed management corruption and corporate malfeasance in these partly state-owned companies. He has been quoted as saying: "You had to become a shareholder activist if you didn't want everything stolen from you". In 1999, Avisma filed a RICO lawsuit against Browder and other Avisma investors, including Kenneth Dart, alleging they illegally siphoned company assets into offshore accounts and then transferred the funds to U.S. accounts at Barclays. Browder and his co-defendants settled with Avisma in 2000; they sold their Avisma shares as part of the confidential settlement agreement. From 1995 to 2006, Hermitage Capital Management was one of the largest foreign investors in Russia, and Browder amassed millions through his management of the fund. In both 2006 and 2007, he earned an estimated £125–£150 million. In March 2013, HSBC, a bank that serves as the trustee and manager of Hermitage Capital Management, announced it would end the fund's operations in Russia. The decision was taken amid two legal cases against Browder: a libel court case in London and a trial in absentia for tax evasion in Moscow. In June 2018, HSBC reached a settlement with the Russian government to pay a £17 million fine to Russian authorities for its part in alleged tax avoidance.
In 2005, after 10 years of business deals in Russia, Browder was blacklisted by the Russian government as a "threat to national security" and denied entry to the country. The Economist wrote that the Russian government blacklisted Browder because he interfered with the flow of money to "corrupt bureaucrats and their businessmen accomplices". Browder had earlier supported Russian president Vladimir Putin. As reported in 2008 by The New York Times, "over the next two years (according to Browder) several of his associates and lawyers, as well as their relatives, became victims of crimes, including severe beatings and robberies during which documents were taken". In June 2007, dozens of police officers "swooped down on the Moscow offices of Hermitage and its law firm, confiscating documents and computers. When a member of the firm protested that the search was illegal, he was beaten by officers and hospitalized for two weeks," said the firm's head, Jamison R. Firestone. Hermitage became "victim of what is known in Russia as 'corporate raiding': seizing companies and other assets with the aid of corrupt law enforcement officials and judges". Three Hermitage holding companies were seized on what the company's lawyers insist were bogus charges. The raids in June 2007 enabled corrupt law enforcement officers to steal the corporate registration documents of three Hermitage holding companies. They perpetrated a fraud, claiming (and receiving) a rebate of $230 million (~$353 million in 2025) in taxes paid by those companies to the Russian state in 2006. In November 2008, one of Hermitage's auditors, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested. He was "charged with two counts of aggravated tax evasion committed in conspiracy with Mr. Browder in respect of Dalnyaya Step and Saturn" (ECHR § 35). Magnitsky died on 16 November 2009, in prison, after 11 months in pretrial detention, nearly the limit allowed under the law. On 27 August 2019, the European Court for Human Rights, in judging a case brought against Russia by the Magnitsky family, ruled that Magnitsky was detained in conditions which amounted to "inhuman and degrading treatment in breach of Article 3 of the Convention" (§ 193). This, combined with negligence, lack of adequate medical care, and ill-treatment also amounted to a breach of the convention (§ 240). Magnitsky's family was awarded €34,000. As a result of the controversy related to his arrest and evidence of mistreatment and claimed abuse, his death aroused international coverage and outrage. Magnitsky's death was the catalyst for passage by the U.S. Congress, of the Magnitsky Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama on 14 December 2012. The act directly targeted individuals involved in the Magnitsky affair by prohibiting their entrance to the U.S. and their use of its banking system. In February 2013, Russian officials announced that Browder and Magnitsky would both be tried for evading $16.8 million (~$22.9 million in 2025) in taxes. In March 2013, Russian authorities announced they would be investigating Hermitage's acquisition of Gazprom shares worth $70 million (~$95.3 million in 2025). The investigation was to focus on whether Browder violated any Russian laws when Hermitage used Russian companies registered in the region of Kalmykia to buy shares. An investigation by the Council of Europe's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights cleared Browder of the accusations of improprieties that surfaced at this time. Browder was also charged with trying to gain access to Gazprom's financial reports.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
