[aspidistra]

For UK readers and or football fans, the Alisher Usmanov mentioned, who now controls VKontakte, is the same Alisher Usmanov who owns a large stake in Arsenal FC.

He also owns a stake in Odnoklassniki, another Russian social media site, which is "for classmates and old friends", a bit like Friends Reunited:

http://odnoklassniki.ru/

[vellum]

The remaining 40 percent of VK belonged to the Mail.ru group, co-owned by … Alisher Usmanov.

Usmanov owns shares in a lot of Silicon Valley companies.[1] Mail.ru's former chairman, Yuri Milner, funded the automatic Y Combinator investments from 2011-2013.[2]

1: http://www.usm-group.com/internet.html

Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga, Spotify, Zalando, ZocDoc, Airbnb, Alibaba and 360buy.

2: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/16/us-venture-milner-...

[dopamean]

As a long time Arsenal fan, fuck Usmanov.