Putin on the Ritz

Article here

Basically, Vladimir Putin is not being entirely forthcoming (shocking!) about his personal net worth. Though he claims to have a net worth of under $500,000, that seems highly unlikely considering his rather expensive tastes. He has been seen wearing a watch valued at $150,000, has several houses and getaways, including one valued at roughly $1 billion, and access to a $40 million yacht. Clearly, either his math isn't great or he's just lying.

The article also gives a bit of Putin's job history. As he likes to promote, he came from a working-class family, then somehow pulled himself up by the bootstraps and made it through law school. From there, he worked for the KGB. After 16 years as a spy, he worked his way up through the political ranks to his appointment as the Chief of Presidential Staff to Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin promoted him to Prime Minister and named Putin as presidential successor. Supposedly, throughout his long reign as president, Putin has acquired ownership stakes in several oil companies. It's those stakes in particular that boost his net worth to approximately $70 billion.

I really don't have much of an opinion on this article, I just wanted an excuse to use this title. The website itself seems legit, though maybe it's not written by the hardest hitting of journalists. However, nothing posited by the article seems that unlikely, as Putin is more often seen as suspicious than trustworthy. And the fact he owns so many nice things is fairly suspicious. Not many people spend a fifth of their yearly income on a watch, and then can afford yachts and vacation homes worth so much more than their likely lifetime income, is all I'm saying. I don't really know what it matters if he's lying about being rich, since he'll be rich regardless, but I guess it's nice to hope for transparency in public figures, even when you know that won't happen.