Category: News

“I couldn’t discuss the price,” Mr. Tinkov said. “It was like a hostage — you take what you are offered. I couldn’t negotiate.”

Mr. Tinkov, 54, spoke to The New York Times by phone on Sunday, from a location he would not disclose, in his first interview since Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine. He said he had hired bodyguards after friends with contacts in the Russian security services told him he should fear for his life, and quipped that while he had survived leukemia, perhaps “the Kremlin will kill me.”

It was a swift and jarring turn of fortune for a longtime billionaire who for years had avoided running afoul of Mr. Putin while portraying himself as independent of the Kremlin. His downfall underscores the consequences facing those in the Russian elite who dare to cross their president, and helps explain why there has been little but silence from business leaders who, according to Mr. Tinkov, are worried about the impact of the war on their lifestyles and their wallets.

Indeed, Mr. Tinkov claimed that many of his acquaintances in the business and government elite told him privately that they agreed with him, “but they are all afraid.”

In the interview, Mr. Tinkov spoke out more forcefully against the war than has any other major Russian business leader.

“I’ve realized that Russia, as a country, no longer exists,” Mr. Tinkov said, predicting that Mr. Putin would stay in power a long time. “I believed that the Putin regime was bad. But of course, I had no idea that it would take on such catastrophic scale.”

The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment.

Tinkoff, the bank Mr. Tinkov started in 2006, denied his characterization of events and said there had been “no threats of any kind against the bank’s leadership.” The bank, which announced last Thursday that Mr. Tinkov had sold his entire stake in the company to a firm run by Vladimir Potanin, a mining magnate close to Mr. Putin, appeared to be distancing itself from its founder.

“Oleg has not been in Moscow for many years, did not participate in the life of the company and was not involved in any matters,” Tinkoff said in a statement.

Mr. Tinkov has also run into trouble in the West. He agreed to pay $507 million last year to settle a tax fraud case in the United States. In March, Britain included him on a list of sanctions against the Russian business elite.

“These oligarchs, businesses and hired thugs are complicit in the murder of innocent civilians and it is right that they pay the price,” Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said at the time.

Mr. Tinkov is nevertheless widely seen as a rare Russian business pioneer, modeling his maverick capitalism on Richard Branson and morphing from irreverent beer brewer to founder of one of the world’s most sophisticated online banks. He says he has never set foot in the Kremlin, and he has occasionally criticized Mr. Putin.

But unlike Russian tycoons who years ago broke with Mr. Putin and now live in exile, such as the former oil magnate Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky or the tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov, Mr. Tinkov found a way to coexist with the Kremlin and make billions — at least until April 19.

That is when Mr. Tinkov published an emotional antiwar post on Instagram, calling the invasion “crazy” and deriding Russia’s military: “Why would we have a good army,’’ he asked, if everything else in the country is dysfunctional “and mired in nepotism, servility and subservience?”

Pro-war Russians posted photos of their shredded Tinkoff debit cards on social media. Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent state television host, delivered a tirade against him, declaring, “Your conscience is rotten.”

Mr. Tinkov was already outside Russia at that point, having departed in 2019 to receive treatment for leukemia. He later stepped down and ceded control of Tinkoff, but kept a 35 percent stake in the company, which was valued at more than $20 billion on the London stock exchange last year.

A day after the April 19 post, Mr. Tinkov said Sunday, the Kremlin contacted the bank’s senior executives and told them that any association with their founder was now a major problem.

“They said: ‘The statement of your shareholder is not welcomed, and we will nationalize your bank if he doesn’t sell it and the owner doesn’t change, and if you don’t change the name,’” Mr. Tinkov said, citing sources at Tinkoff he declined to identify.

On April 22, Tinkoff announced it would change its name this year, a step it claims was long planned. Behind the scenes, Mr. Tinkov says, he was scrambling to sell his stake — one that had already been devalued by Western sanctions against Russia’s financial system.

Mr. Tinkov said he was thankful to Mr. Potanin, the mining magnate, for allowing him to salvage at least some money from his company; he said that he could not disclose a price, but that he had sold at 3 percent of what he believed to be his stake’s true value.

“They made me sell it because of my pronouncements,” Mr. Tinkov said. “I sold it for kopecks.”

He had been considering selling his stake anyway, Mr. Tinkov said, because “as long as Putin is alive, I doubt anything will change.”

“I don’t believe in Russia’s future,” he said. “Most importantly, I am not prepared to associate my brand and my name with a country that attacks its neighbors without any reason at all.”

Mr. Tinkov is concerned that a foundation he started that is dedicated to improving blood cancer treatment in Russia could also become a casualty of his financial trouble.

He denied that he was speaking out in the hopes of getting the U.K. sanctions against him lifted, though he said he hoped the British government would eventually “correct this mistake.”

He said that his illness — he is now suffering from graft-versus-host disease, a stem-cell transplant complication, he said — might have made him more courageous about speaking out than other Russian business leaders and senior officials. Members of the elite, he claimed, are “in shock” about the war and have called him in great numbers to offer support.

“They understand that they are tied to the West, that they are part of the global market, and so on,” Mr. Tinkov said. “They’re fast, fast being turned into Iran. But they don’t like it. They want their kids to spend their summer holidays in Sardinia.”

Mr. Tinkov said that no one from the Kremlin had ever contacted him directly, but that in addition to the pressure on his company, he heard from friends with security service contacts that he could be in physical danger.

“They told me: ‘The decision regarding you has been made,’” he said. “Whether that means that on top of everything they’re going to kill me, I don’t know. I don’t rule it out.”

The system certainly has its advantages. It more or less guarantees national ownership of European decision-making; everyone recognizes their fingerprints on the final agreement. This sense of ownership helps to explain why the union has survived so many crises in recent years: Member states have invested in it, depend on it and, crucially, want it to survive. But the downside to this approach is that by seeking consensus on almost every issue, Europe becomes as strong only as its weakest link. Leaders regularly make half-baked decisions because some countries refuse to go further, with results that do not always meet Europe’s real needs.

Examples are legion. Hungary, for instance, has blocked several foreign policy statements against Russia or China that all other member states agreed on. Poland, for its part, has single-handedly diluted Europe’s climate goals. And before the presidential elections in France, the government there delayed a decision on a European oil embargo against Russia, fearing the resulting rise of energy prices could favor Ms. Le Pen in her campaign against Mr. Macron. Often, Europe is the plaything of member states seeking to promote their own narrow interests. Mr. Macron, however “pro-European,” is no exception.

That’s why elections often cause such headaches. Democracy, to be sure, is Europe’s strength. It is the union’s core value, its beating heart. But democracy is also Europe’s weakness. That’s because the union is not really European: Instead, it involves 27 separate, national democracies. If one of them produces a Eurosceptic government, it can endanger the entire European project, which depends on unanimity. The union is effectively held hostage every time elections are held somewhere — hardly a sustainable way to do things.

The French election, Mr. Macron said, was “a referendum on Europe.” The problem with Europe is exactly that: Every election is a referendum about Europe, in every corner of the continent. It would be strange if a state election in Montana or Mississippi risked undoing the Republic or derailing its foreign policy. In Europe, this is normal practice. That’s partly why, despite its success as a global economic powerhouse and a beacon of stability, Europe often lacks confidence and looks vulnerable in the mildest headwind.

Yet this paradox needn’t be permanent. In a world defined by instability, great power competition and rising prices, Europe must look after itself — and it has the means to do so. A phased embargo on Russian oil, likely to be finalized this week, is just a start. In the wake of the war in Ukraine, collective provision of defense and security is also a must, as is an energy union. What’s more, some kind of fiscal union — augmenting the current monetary union — might also be necessary, to coordinate the serious investments needed to shore up Europe’s resilience. Recognizing the need for bolstered unity, a group of European intellectuals last week even called for a United States of Europe.

I’m not sure the union will ever come to that. But it would be nice if at the policy game in Berlin this year, instead of fretting over worst-case scenarios, we could perhaps let ourselves imagine a bolder, stronger European Union. If we could all allow Europe to stand a little more on its own feet, it would make a world of difference.

The new arrangement freed Mr. Ive from regular commutes to the company’s offices in Cupertino. He shifted from near daily product reviews to an irregular schedule when weeks would pass without weighing in. Sometimes word would spread through the studio that he was unexpectedly coming to the office. Employees compared the moments that followed with old footage of the 1920s stock market crash with papers being tossed into the air and people scurrying around in a furious rush to prepare for his arrival.

With anticipation mounting on Wall Street for a 10th-anniversary iPhone in early 2017, Mr. Ive summoned the company’s top software designers to San Francisco for a product review. A team of about 20 arrived at the city’s exclusive social club, The Battery, and began spreading out 11-by-17-inch printouts of design ideas in the club’s penthouse. They needed Mr. Ive’s approval for several features on the first iPhone with a full-screen display.

They waited that day for nearly three hours for Mr. Ive. When he finally arrived, he didn’t apologize. He reviewed their printouts and offered feedback. He then left without making final decisions. As their work stalled, many wondered, How did it come to this?

In Mr. Ive’s absence, Mr. Cook began reshaping the company in his image. He replaced the outgoing company director Mickey Drexler, the gifted marketer who built Gap and J. Crew, with James Bell, the former finance chief at Boeing. Mr. Ive was irate that a left-brained executive had supplanted one of the board’s few right-brained leaders. “He’s another one of those accountants,” he complained to a colleague.

Mr. Cook also emboldened the company’s finance department, which began auditing outside contractors. At one point, the department rejected a legitimate billing submitted by Foster + Partners, the architecture firm working closely with Mr. Ive to complete the company’s new $5 billion campus, Apple Park.

Amid those struggles, Mr. Cook began to broaden Apple’s strategy into selling more services. During a corporate retreat in 2017, Mr. Ive stepped outside to get fresh air when a newcomer to Apple named Peter Stern stepped before the company’s top leaders. Mr. Stern clicked to a slide of an X-shaped chart that showed Apple’s profit margins from sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs declining while profit margins rose from sales of software and services like its iCloud storage.

The presentation alarmed some people in the audience. It depicted a future in which Mr. Ive — and the company’s business as a product maker — would matter less and Mr. Cook’s increasing emphasis on services, like Apple Music and iCloud, would matter more.

That sounds very patriotic.

Patriotism became more intense after 2014, but now it’s inescapable. For example, I can’t get the Ukrainian national anthem out of my head. You hear it in cars, in shops, in the grocery store. It’s not like people stop and put their hands on their hearts. But I’m going around humming it.

What about electricity, heat, basic needs?

It depends on the place. On the front, in the east, there’s very little — no power, no gas, no water. I was in Avdiivka recently, a town on the front line, where a lot of people were in basements all day long. Everyone’s pooling all their resources. For power, people have generators.

In those places, how do people shower or use the bathroom?

In Avdiivka, there’s no running water. Officials have to ship it in. I went to this one apartment complex where 200 people were using one toilet, and they flushed it by taking water and doing it manually. It’s a grim existence. And that’s not even talking about the constant shelling.

What about niceties many of us take for granted, like Wi-Fi?

In a lot of places, the internet is still working; phones are still working. In Avdiivka, city officials have put up solar-powered charging stations where people charge their phones.

There’s nothing you can do in your apartment. When people did come out, they’d stay in their buildings’ courtyards. They are one of the few places left to socialize in frontline cities and villages. People were cooking food over an open fire for all the neighbors.

How would you describe the mood of Ukrainians?

People miss their former life — the lives they’ll probably never get back, at least not in the same way.

They’re in mobilization mode. Either they’re volunteering or fighting or taking care of their relatives. I don’t know what people are doing in moments of self-reflection. But when they’re out and about, you don’t see a lot of despair. Everyone’s so stoic, even in the midst of a bombing.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, opted against going to the dinner because of the obvious danger. Organizers required all guests to be vaccinated, boosted and test negative before attending, although few wore masks besides the serving staff. As a concession to the potential peril, Mr. Biden, who at 79 is in a high-risk age group, skipped the dinner and came only for the speaking portion of the evening.

But his presence was meant to represent a return to normalcy after Mr. Trump’s war on the news media. While Mr. Biden, like other presidents, has complained about his coverage, sometimes snapping at reporters who ask questions he does not care for, aides said he intended his decision to attend to be a reaffirmation of his support for a free press.

“The free press is not the enemy of the people,” Mr. Biden said. “Far from it. At your best, you’re guardians of the truth.” He cited in particular those who have given their lives reporting from the battlefields of Ukraine, a reminder, he said, of the importance of journalism.

Still, the president gently chided journalists, urging them to avoid sensationalism and trivialization. “The First Amendment grants a free press extraordinary protection,” he said, “but with it comes, as many of you know, a very heavy obligation to seek the truth as best you can, not to inflame or entertain but to illuminate and educate.”

“There’s incredible pressure on you all to deliver heat instead of shed light,” he said, adding, “American democracy is not a reality show.”

The correspondents’ association made a point of adding a serious note to the evening’s festivities by honoring two Black female pioneers of the White House press corps, Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne, who were two of only three African American journalists regularly reporting on the White House in the 1950s. It also paid tribute to journalists killed in Ukraine and singled out the family of Austin Tice, a reporter who was abducted in Syria in 2012.

But the event otherwise resumed its status as Washington’s premier exercise in excess, bracketed by days of fancy, expensive, alcohol-filled parties held across the city late into the night, bringing members of the political class together with the journalists who cover them and the occasional fixtures of Hollywood, Wall Street and other American institutions.

Still, the interest rates on the loans reflect the risk that they might not get paid back. The banks don’t hold on to the loans but sell them to other investors in the market, so if Twitter can’t pay its debts, Mr. Musk will either have to pay those investors, perhaps by selling more Tesla stock, or he could cede some part of his ownership of Twitter, diluting his stake.

Tesla had a market value of $902 billion as of Friday, but its shares have fallen by nearly 20 percent since Mr. Musk first revealed, in early April, that he had bought a big stake in Twitter. If Twitter’s finances go south, forcing Mr. Musk to sell more Tesla stock to pay Twitter’s debts or pledge more shares as collateral for his personal loans, it could put further pressure on Tesla’s stock price. Mr. Musk doesn’t take a salary from Tesla but is paid in stock that is released based on performance milestones that include the company’s share price.

Since Mr. Musk first disclosed his stake, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index has fallen more than 10 percent, making his offer appear even more generous. “It’s a high price and your shareholders will love it,” Mr. Musk said in a letter to Twitter’s board. Although the social media company’s stock had traded higher than Mr. Musk’s offer just six months ago, it slumped far below that price early this year and looked unlikely to return to those highs any time soon.

Mr. Musk has considered teaming up with investment firms in his bid to buy Twitter, which would reduce the amount of money he would personally have to invest. He could still partner with a firm or other investors like family offices to help raise cash, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.

Thoma Bravo, a technology-focused buyout firm, has expressed willingness to provide some financing, but nothing has been decided yet. Apollo, an alternative asset manager, also looked at a possible deal where it would extend a loan on preferred terms.

If the deal math becomes unpalatable for Mr. Musk, he has an out: a breakup fee of $1 billion. For a man with an estimated fortune well over $200 billion, that’s a small price to pay.