Former Russian banking tycoon Oleg Tinkov says a single Instagram post condemning the war in Ukraine cost him nearly $9 billion, after he was forced to sell his stake in his bank for a fraction of its real value. He described the episode as a “hostage” situation that shows how dissenting billionaires are brought to heel in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Tinkov, the founder of Tinkoff Bank, was once celebrated as one of Russia’s wealthiest bankers. That status changed dramatically in April 2022, when he used Instagram to denounce the war as “insane” and to criticize Russia’s military as poorly prepared and riddled with corruption. As CNBC reported at the time, Tinkov claimed 90% of Russians opposed the war, and the remaining 10% were “morons.” He urged an immediate and “face-saving” end to the war.
Tinkov told the BBC recently that within a day of that post, senior executives at his bank received a call from officials linked to the Kremlin, delivering a stark ultimatum. Either Tinkov’s stake would be sold and his name scrubbed from the brand, or the bank—then one of Russia’s largest lenders—would be nationalized.
A forced fire sale
Tinkov said that what followed was not a negotiation but coercion under threat. He claimed he was told to accept whatever price was offered for his roughly 35% stake in TCS Group, the owner of Tinkoff Bank, or risk losing everything. “I couldn’t negotiate the price. I was like a hostage,” he told The New York Times. He ultimately sold the stake in April 2022, shortly after his Instagram post.
Within a week of this conversation, Tinkov said, a firm linked to metals magnate Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest men and a key supplier of nickel used in military hardware, stepped in to buy the stake. Tinkov told the BBC that the deal valued his holding at just about 3% of its true market worth, wiping out almost $9 billion of the wealth he had built over decades in business.
Exile and erasure
After the sale, Tinkov left Russia, eventually renouncing his Russian citizenship and becoming one of the few high-profile businessmen to publicly break with the Kremlin over the war. He alleged that the campaign against him extended beyond the balance sheet, including pressure to remove his name from the bank brand and efforts to erase his role in building the institution that once carried it.
In his telling, the episode shows how quickly loyalty is enforced when oligarchs step out of line. Public criticism of the invasion, even from a figure whose bank helped power Russia’s consumer boom, was treated as a direct challenge to the state in wartime. There are numerous examples from the recent past, including the erstwhile oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly Russia’s richest man, who spent 10 years in jail after launching a pro-democracy organization in 2001. Like Tinkov, he has since become an exile, residing in London.
For his part, Tinkov has taken a few years to retrench and is newly visible in 2025, recently emerging as a backer of Plata, a Mexican fintech led by former Tinkoff Bank executives.
But the former oligarch’s experience sits within a wider pattern described by analysts who say the Kremlin now relies on a mix of fear and opportunity to keep Russia’s wealthy elite compliant. Sanctions, war-time controls and the threat of asset seizures have made fortunes inside Russia highly contingent on political loyalty, while the departure of Western firms has opened up bargain acquisitions for trusted allies.
The war in Ukraine, meanwhile, has rumbled on, with President Trump holding meetings and calls with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. After the 2025 Christmas holiday, Trump met with Zelensky at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida while fielding phone calls with Putin, claiming a peace deal is “closer than ever,” more than three years after Tinkov made his fateful Instagram post.
A stark new economic analysis reveals the Trump administration’s trade policies are extracting a heavy toll from Main Street, with small-business importers paying approximately $25,000 more per month in tariff costs since April 2025. The report, published Dec. 17 by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-wing think tank, details how a “chaotic approach” to trade and the elimination of key import exceptions have created a financial crisis for entrepreneurs during the critical holiday season.
According to the analysis by Michael Negron and Mimla Wardak, the administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement triggered a sharp increase in duties collected from American businesses. From April through September 2025, CAP estimated, the roughly 236,000 small-business importers in the U.S. paid an average of more than $151,000 in additional tariffs compared to the same period in 2024. (CAP cited the centrist Chamber of Commerce’s research on the small-business importer sector of the economy.)
“The Trump administration’s broad, costly, and frequently shifting policies threaten to undermine one of the strongest engines of the American economy,” Negron said in a statement to Fortune. “A season of opportunity for small businesses has turned into one of uncertainty.”
The burden is not limited to larger enterprises. The report found “mom-and-pop” businesses—those with fewer than 50 employees—paid, on average, over $86,000 more per business during this six-month window than they did the previous year. The outlook for the immediate future is equally grim: CAP projects that if current monthly costs persist, the typical small business will face a tariff bill exceeding $500,000 in 2026, potentially resulting in additional layoffs, bankruptcies, and delayed investments. For the holidays, CAP concludes the tariffs are a “costly lump of coal” in American small business’ collective, proverbial Christmas stocking.
Administrative red tape stifles growth
Beyond direct financial costs, small business owners are struggling with a sudden increase in bureaucratic red tape. The administration eliminated the de minimis exception, which previously allowed low-value shipments to enter the U.S. without duties or extensive paperwork. This policy change has forced businesses to prepay new tariff rates and complete complex customs forms for millions of shipments that were formerly exempt.
Jyoti Jaiswal, founder of OMSutra, a small business selling sustainable fashion and home goods, told CAP the changes have forced her to consolidate shipments and block more capital upfront. Jaiswal noted her company now spends 10 to 15 hours on tariff-related administrative work per shipment, up from eight to 10 hours previously, preventing her from passing costs on to consumers without losing competitiveness.
Similarly, Legrand Lindor, CEO of LMI Textiles, told CAP his medical supply company went from spending zero time on tariff paperwork to spending four to five hours per transaction. Facing a 20% increase in product costs—roughly $80,000 in additional spending—Lindor was forced to scrap plans to open a new warehouse in 2025.
The rising costs appear to be cooling the labor market for small firms. Data from payroll provider ADP shows that businesses with fewer than 50 employees laid off 120,000 workers in November 2025, the highest number of small-business layoffs in five years.
While the administration claimed foreign nations would pay these costs, the report emphasizes tariffs are taxes paid by American importers. Goldman Sachs calculated that of August 2025, businesses had absorbed 51% of the cost of tariffs, though they had passed 37% onto consumers through higher prices. A survey by Small Business Majority from late 2025 indicated 74% of small-business owners are now worried about their business surviving the next 12 months.
Compounding financial pressures
The tariff crisis coincides with other financial headwinds. The report highlights the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits in 2026 threatens to double premiums for millions of entrepreneurs and small-business employees.
With the holiday season typically accounting for at least one-quarter of annual revenue for retailers, the convergence of high tariffs and administrative confusion has delivered what the report describes as “a decidedly unhappy holiday season” for the nation’s 236,000 small-business importers. Without a change in policy, these businesses face the prospect of escalating costs and reduced investment heading into the new year.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
The American media landscape has officially crossed the Rubicon, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence’s annual Economics of Basic Cable report from its Kagan research unit. It’s a grim read.
The U.S. cable network industry has formally entered the “decline stage of its life cycle,” a transition defined by falling revenues, shrinking viewership, and an unprecedented restructuring of legacy assets. While the sector faces a tough financial trajectory, the defining event is the high-stakes bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), where streaming giant Netflix. and traditional powerhouse Paramount Skydance present two starkly different paths for the future of cable television.
The inflection point identified in the 2025 report is not a sudden crash, but rather a structural dismantling of the cable bundle that dominated entertainment for decades. The WBD negotiations encapsulate this shift. While Paramount Skydance aims to acquire the company in its entirety, Netflix is bidding solely for WBD’s film studio and streaming assets. Should Netflix prevail, WBD’s cable assets would be split off, effectively stranding the linear networks as the industry leader cannibalizes the content engine for its digital platform.
“These decisions signify a shift in the media industry as companies abandon cable networks in favor of streaming services,” wrote S&P’s Scott Robson, who also noted that the “burgeoning free ad-supported television (FAST) industry also continues to evolve as owners of library video content increasingly look for monetization outlets outside of basic cable syndication.”
Since the “cord-cutting” movement ushered in by Netflix gathered steam, Robson noted that linear network TV has been under pressure—subscriptions peaked all the way back in 2012. Looking back at 2025 now, he concluded, there’s no comeback in sight.
Mapping out the decline ahead
This potential fracturing of WBD mirrors broader industry movements. Comcast is set to finalize the spinoff of its cable networks—excluding Bravo—into a standalone entity named “Versant” on January 2, 2026. These strategic exits signal that major media conglomerates are now willing to “abandon cable networks in favor of streaming services,” a trend accelerated by the August 2025 launches of the ESPN Unlimited and FOX One streaming platforms, according to S&P.
The financial data underpinning this migration is stark. In 2024, gross advertising revenue for cable networks fell 5.9% to $20.2 billion, the lowest level recorded since 2007. Robson’s team also estimated that affiliate fee revenue, or what TV operators pay to carry cable operators, fell nearly 3% to roughly $38.7 billion. Perhaps most telling is the subscriber metric: the average cable network saw its subscriber base erode by 7.1% to 31.4 million homes.
However, S&P emphasized that this “decline stage” forecasts a long, slow bleedout rather than a precipitous fall. “After digesting all the major events that took place in 2025, it is clear that the industry has reached a turning point,” Robson wrote. “That being said, our outlook does not call for a major collapse but rather a continued slow decline as the transition to streaming develops.”
S&P noted that despite the overarching downward trend, the rate of pay TV subscription decline appeared to slow in 2025, with the industry actually registering slight subscriber growth in the third quarter.
Operators are attempting to manage this descent by clinging to the industry’s last reliable life raft: live sports. The year 2026 looms large, featuring both the Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. Comcast has even relaunched NBCSN, packaging it into a sports-centric bundle on YouTube TV to capture viewers who haven’t yet migrated to its Peacock streaming service.
A separate S&P analysis concluded that sports may no longer be a moat for the declining linear TV business. “Live sports may not be the anchor that once kept consumers from cutting the video cord,” S&P’s Keith Nissen wrote.
Nissen cited an S&P survey that found 90% of households dropping traditional pay TV for sports over the past year were sports fans, and nearly two-thirds of them spent five or more hours per week watching sports. “This serves as evidence that access to live sports is no longer a differentiator between traditional and virtual multichannel services.”
Robson warned that the friction between rising costs and falling value has intensified, with 2025 marred by carriage disputes, including blackouts of Walt Disney and TelevisaUnivision networks on YouTube TV, as distributors pushed back against rising rates for diminishing audiences.
As 2026 approaches, the industry outlook is one where underperforming networks face relegation to expensive tiers or outright closure.
The situation is akin to an estate sale for a once-grand mansion. The owners (media conglomerates) are systematically selling off the furniture (cable networks) and moving the most valuable heirlooms (premium content and sports rights) into a modern apartment across town (streaming), leaving the old house to slowly empty out, room by room.
Editor’s note: The author worked for Netflix from June 2024 through July 2025.
If you have dreams of joining the billionaire’s club one day, the best place to start might not be business school—it might be your local book club.
Reading is the most commonly cited habit tied to the success of some of the world’s wealthiest families, according to a new JPMorgan report that surveyed more than 100 billionaire principals whose collective net worth exceeds $500 billion.
The wealth management firm found that exercise, consistency, and waking up early are also top contributors to long-term success. But across interviews, one theme dominated: extreme intentionality about how time is spent.
“The currency of life is time,” wrote one anonymous billionaire family leader in the report. “It is not money. You think carefully about how you spend one dollar. You should think just as carefully as how you spend one hour.”
Forget an MBA—dust off a book if you want to become a billionaire
In a technology-driven era where tools like ChatGPT can summarize hundreds of pages in seconds, sitting down with a book may feel inefficient. But many of the world’s most successful business leaders have long argued the opposite: deep reading remains one of the fastest ways to build durable knowledge.
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has credited reading as the backbone of his learning routine. At one point, Gates said he read about 50 books a year to stay intellectually sharp.
“It is one of the chief ways that I learn, and has been since I was a kid,” Gates told The New York Timesin 2016. “These days, I also get to visit interesting places, meet with scientists and watch a lot of lectures online. But reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding.”
The best book he had ever read at the time was Business Adventures by John Brooks, the first book Warren Buffett ever recommended to him after they met.
Buffett, for his part, is also an avid reader.
“I just read and read and read,” Buffett said when asked how he keeps up with what’s going on in the world. “I probably read five to six hours a day. I don’t read as fast now as when I was younger, but I read five daily newspapers, I read a fair number of magazines, I read 10Ks, I read annual reports, and I read a lot of other things.”
His advice for aspiring business leaders is ambitious: read 500 pages each day.
“That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
The top 7 habits attributing to success of the world’s wealthiest families
Reading
Exercise
Consistency
Waking up early
Prioritizing tasks
Goal setting
Deep thinking time
According to JPMorgan’s latest Principal Discussions report.
How the ultra-wealthy spend their free time
Even though reading is cited as a major driver of long-term success, it isn’t how most ultra-wealthy families prefer to spend all their downtime.
In the JPMorgan report, reading ranked No. 7 among hobbits and interests principals said they were most passionate about—trailing outdoor activities, time with family and friends, and even work itself.
The top 10 hobbies or interests wealthy families are passionate about
Outdoors and nature
Work
Time with family and friends
Tennis
Snow sports
Golf
Reading
Gym and working out
Fishing
Cycling and biking
That gap highlights a key distinction: while reading may not be the top pastime, its value means it’s treated as a strategic discipline—a pattern that’s likely to become even more notable as AI reshapes how information is consumed.
AI use is already widespread among the ultra-wealthy. Nearly 8 in 10 principals said they use AI in their personal lives, and 69% reported using it in business. In a world where information is easier than ever to access, being intentional about how you learn—and how you spend your time—may matter more than ever.
JPMorgan’s own 2026 book list “to inspire big thinking and bold exploration” reflects that focus. Recommendations include Bobbi Brown’s memoir, Still Bobbi, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the 1929 Wall Street crash, and Air Jordan, a look at Michael Jordan’s successes in the business world.
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