Yuri Milner is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and physicist. He is also the Founder, Managing Partner, and Chairman of the Board of Mail.ru, which he founded in 1999. Mr. Milner’s fortune has been estimated at 3 billion dollars. His philanthropic activity has focused on support for fundamental science and education as well as the promotion of entrepreneurship and investment in emerging social media and technology companies worldwide.
- Awards
In 2011, Mr. Milner was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and Innovation from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation for his work in mathematics and theoretical computer science with Stephen Wolfram and his initiative to launch a multinational effort to search for intelligent life in space. The Isaac Newton PRIZE, which carries an award of 5 million British pounds ($8.8 million), has been awarded to Mr. Milner by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
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- Achievements
Yuri Milner is the Founder of the Breakthrough Prize. In 2007, Mr. Milner co-founded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Dr. Eric Lander and Dr. Richard Roberts, Founding Director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and President of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Yuri also Founded DST Global, Breakthrough Prizes, Breakthrough Initiative, and the Breakthrough Starshot.
- Philanthropy
In November 2012, Milner pledged $100 million to a scientific project called “Breakthrough Listen,” an initiative to detect signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Yuri Milner is also the main sponsor of the $100,000 Fundamental Physics Prize, endowed by the Milner Foundation. In September 2016, Milner and Stephen Hawking announced a $100 million investment in Breakthrough Starshot towards developing Minecraft space probes that could be sent to Alpha Centauri within two decades.
In a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Milner said that he had been involved in collaboration with Mark Zuckerberg to create an artificial intelligence middleman: an “Orbital Network” — a.k.a. The Internet Of Things — that would “allow all sorts of machines to talk to each other easily and even to talk to humans, providing instant translation into any language.”