The Men
Who Own
Kazakhstan

When Forbes Kazakhstan published its 2025 ranking, the top line was staggering: 75 people collectively holding nearly $74.5 billion — roughly a quarter of Kazakhstan's entire GDP, concentrated in a group small enough to fit in a single conference room.

At the summit sits Vyacheslav Kim, 55, chairman of Kaspi.kz — Kazakhstan's largest fintech platform — with $7.1 billion. Just behind him: Timur Turlov, 37, who grew Freedom Holding Corp from a small brokerage into a $5.8 billion empire in under a decade. Two men who represent the two eras of Kazakh capitalism: the privatisation generation, and the digital one.

The rest of the list tells a more uniform story — of a particular kind of man, from a particular generation, who found opportunity in the wreckage of the Soviet Union and never looked back.

The dominant cohort is Gen X — born 1965–1980, young adults when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. They entered the post-independence economy with energy and ambition, and found extraordinary opportunity in the chaos of privatisation. Nearly 40 of the 75 belong to this generation.

Baby Boomers — those who held senior Soviet-era positions and converted them into private capital — form the second-largest group. Millennials are a growing but still minor presence, with Turlov as the most dramatic outlier: wealth built from code, not coal.

Only three women appear as named individuals: Dinara Kulibayeva ($5.3B, co-owner of Halyk Bank and Almex Group); Dariga Nazarbayeva ($571M, daughter of the former president); and Aizhan Yesim ($210M, phosphorites). That is 4% female representation among identified individuals.

The reasons are structural. Privatisation of state assets in the 1990s, capture of natural resource revenues, and formation of large financial-industrial groups all unfolded in environments where women had limited access to capital, political networks, and the informal power relationships that translated Soviet positions into capitalist fortunes.