It's interesting that the only 3 self-made billionaires under 40 are in tech - Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg. The fact that 12 of the top 100 are Russian is rather striking to me as well.
Also striking is how the Russians made their money: energy, steel, metals, and... uh... "being friends with the people in power when the Soviet Union fell".
I am also really surprised by number of russians. If you consider it with other BRIC countries (Brazil 3,India 2, China 1) then you have to believe something really strange is going on in russia
It's not so strange, pretty straightforward actually.
When the Soviet Union fell apart a whole load of state assets were privatized right into the hands of well-connected people for below market value [1].
Pretty easy to make money when you're handed a monopoly, at a deep discount.
The original intention was to effectively give every Russian citizen stock in all the newly privatized businesses. They did this, but the oligarchs were able to front-run the actual privatizations and bought all the stock for pennies on the dollar (ruble?) compared to what they ended up being worth.
Taking all the economic activity that was going on under communism and immediately privatizing it is probably bound to create a few fortunes no matter how you do it, but the way it ended up happening in Russia was needlessly corrupt.
