With an estimated fortune of $600m, Russian-born Serguei Beloussov appears to have it all – but he says being super rich does have its problems.
The 45-year-old is the co-founder, CEO and chairman of the board of global data protection company Acronis and plans to create the next billion-dollar company by 2020.
However in an exclusive interview with BusinessCloud, Beloussov said there were some downsides to being so rich.
“I’ve been married multiple times,” he said. “I have seven children: six daughters and one son. You know what is especially difficult? I have too many women to buy for at Christmas time and birthdays.
“They are especially hard to buy for. The problem here is my daughters have everything they want. So trying to come up with presents for every event is hard.”
Beloussov, who has houses in London, Boston and Singapore – where Acronis is based – also said his focus on work means you’ll rarely find him on a beach.
“I just don’t know what else to do,” he explained. “I think a lot of people who have a fortune don’t sit on a beach. If you look at most of them they all work very hard because they don’t know how to sit on a beach. You have to get used to it.
“So to sit on a beach you have to learn it, you have to know how and start liking it. I just don’t like it because I was never, ever exposed to it.”
The entrepreneur founded Acronis in 2003 while at Parallels, a business virtualisation company he continues to serve as executive chairman and chief architect.
He only took up the role of CEO at Acronis in 2013 in order to overhaul the cloud infrastructure services it provides.
“We are a very global company,” he told BusinessCloud. “Technically our headquarters are in Singapore but we have offices in 33 countries too.
“We do business in 20 languages and we sell our software in 145 countries. Our plan is to be over a billion dollars by 2020.”