In July 2024 a man who had paid more tax than anyone in Britain lost a court case about tax.
Alexander Gerko had been named the UK's largest taxpayer by the Sunday Times that January, with GBP 664.5m. The Court of Appeal case, against HM Revenue and Customs, concerned the treatment of a deferred payment plan from his years at the hedge fund GSA Capital. He lost.
What almost nobody pictures behind the billionaire is a man whose route to London ran through blackboards and exam halls.
He was born in Russia in December 1979 to a Russian Jewish family. He studied mathematics at Moscow State University, earning bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, and added an economics master's at the New Economic School and another degree at the Independent University of Moscow. He wrote research papers, including one on testing market timing.
In 2004 he started trading equities at Deutsche Bank and then moved to foreign exchange. In 2006 he moved to the UK. From 2009 he was at GSA Capital, the hedge fund where that deferred pay arrangement later led him to court.
What almost nobody pictures behind the billionaire is a man whose route to London ran through blackboards and exam halls. In January 2015 he founded XTX Markets as a spin-off of GSA, and kept about 75% of it. The firm used machine-learning models to quote prices for currencies and, later, European equities. In 2016 it ranked ninth by FX volume, the first non-bank in the top ten. By 2019 it was the largest FX spot liquidity provider. In 2022 revenue rose 68% to GBP 2.5bn, with profit of GBP 1.1bn.
Money has pushed him toward mathematics itself. XTX has committed over GBP 250m to charity since 2017, much of it for maths education, and launched a $10m AI prize for a model that can win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad. In 2022 he gave up his Russian citizenship and became British.
The cost of a mathematician's rise is that the private rules he once negotiated become public. For a founder, the quiet lesson is that early pay deals and tax structures outlive the job, and can come back as headlines. The sources read here do not record how Gerko felt about the ruling.