Chichvarkin belongs to a select but growing club of mega-moguls from emerging-market economies whose capitalist triumphs are winning them celebrity status. Unlike their predecessors who often kept a low profile for safety or to avoid suspicion their gains may have been ill-gotten, the new CEOs aren’t afraid to flaunt what they’ve got, or leverage their own PR for further gain in the manner of Donald Trump or Richard Branson. Consider Indian liquor titan Vijay Mallya, a billionaire who isn’t bashful about his 25 houses, three private jets and two helicopters, or the gold chains he displays by wearing his sports shirts unbuttoned to the middle of his 51-year-old chest.
These rich and famous business leaders embody various seismic changes in their countries—the death of centrally planned economies, the rise of capitalism and the shift toward Western entrepreneurialism. Some of the younger moguls display a Trump-esque disdain for the so-called losers of the globalization era. “It’s shameful to be poor,” says Chichvarkin. “If you are poor, you are stupid.”
But while the new moguls may scorn the poor, they court the middle-class consumer. When Ricardo Salinas Pliego—Mexico’s third richest man—became CEO of his family’s Elektra appliance-store chain in 1987, the business was nearly broke. Salinas Pliego, who cultivates an image of studied cool, with designer eyewear and a football star’s two-day stubble, took the company from 59 outlets to 1,700 today. This was thanks in part to the success of Banco Azteca, which Salinas Pliego opened five years ago to give Mexico’s working and lower-middle classes easier access to consumer credit. A growing middle class has also enriched Mallya, who is a fixture on the Bangalore socialite circuit and is often seen squiring one of the models who adorn his Kingfisher-beer swimsuit calendars. His gossip-column exposure is a calculated move in a country where millions can now aspire, if not to join Mallya’s party, at least to buy his beers or a coach ticket on his Kingfisher airline.
Salinas Pliego sees himself as a different kind of titan. “The businessmen of 20, 30 or 40 years ago were part of the government, and depending on favors and contracts,” he told NEWSWEEK. “Now we’re focused on the Mexican middle class.” Salinas Pliego is by no means squeaky-clean. The 51-year-old billionaire was accused of fraud in 2005 by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the purchase and resale of debt owed by his cell-phone company, and he had to pay some $7.5 million in penalties and compensation to the Feds.
The new breed of CEOs is shifting how people think about economic development. In China, for example, intellectual-property pirating is a growth industry. But Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce firm Alibaba.com, belongs to a generation of innovators who want to create their own value. The entrepreneur launched his Web page from his Hangzhou apartment in 1999, and in just two years it became the world’s largest business to-business e-commerce site. “In China the mentality is, why make something new when you can make the same thing for less money and sell it for less?” says Tsinghua University economist Jiang Yanfu. “What Ma did was shift the emphasis from imitation to innovation.”
The crop of developing- nation business leaders may also play a bigger future role in politics, like former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox, Mexico’s former president. Ecuadoran banana king Alvaro Noboa and Chilean airline owner Sebasti?n Pi?era mounted strong presidential campaigns before falling short in second-round runoff elections in 2006. Their performance showed that a business r?sum? can be a plus for voters in a region where wealth has traditionally been equated with corruption. It’s a laudable goal—but don’t expect all the new moguls to take the high road. In a slightly xenophobic PR stunt, Russia’s irrepressible Chichvarkin recently covered the floor in one of his company’s headquarters with euro banknotes so that his employees “can walk on currency their boss does not respect.” He’s no diplomat, but the man knows how to get attention.
