We went to London for a few days for Gareth’s recent birthday — a giddy whirl of Greggs, Comptoir Libanais, The Oresteia, pastries, Uber Boat up the Thames, Jurassic Monsters at the Natural History Museum, afternoon tea at Maison François (with babkas instead of scones!), Taiwanese dance at the Coronet, and a slap-up brunch at Bill’s.
On our first day, while we were on the tube to Canary Wharf, a young man came over to us and asked me if I was Alex Gerko.
I wasn’t, of course, but I said I was intrigued about who this person might be.
Apparently, he’s “the king of Britain’s geeks” — a Russian-born British billionaire financial trader, who renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022 after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; his company has since given tens of millions to Ukrainian charities.
The company in question is XTX Markets, where Gerko is the founder and co-CEO. XTX is “a leading algorithmic trading firm that uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to produce price forecasts for over 53,000 financial instruments across equities, fixed income, currencies, commodities and crypto.” I’m not providing links to their website. They don’t need the traffic. And you don’t need to look, either.
The thing that did intrigue me, however, was when Young Man on the Tube told us Alex Gerko was the UK’s biggest taxpayer.
The BBC website has subsequently told me he paid £331.4 million pounds in tax in the past year.
Yes, you did read that figure right.
He’s currently said to be worth in the region of £12 billion. In 2025, he paid himself £682 million after a surge in company profits; his earnings for the year were somewhere around the £895 million mark. As the yin to that yang, he paid £665 million in tax in 2023. So I guess it all balances out on a cosmic scale.
And the plot only thickens from there; in June 2026, the UK Supreme Court dismissed Gerko’s appeal in a long-running battle with HMRC over historical trading profits, meaning he may now be liable to pay another £22.5 million, which he is understood to not be very pleased about.
Alec, aka Young Man on the Tube, seemed to be some kind of finance bro (or aspiring finance bro) and, if I heard him right, he was soon going to get the chance to interview Gerko, and was feeling nervous about it. We told him not to be nervous, to remember that Gerko is just a person like anyone else. I’m not sure Alec was convinced. But if you’re confident enough to ask someone on the Tube if they’re mega-rich, I think you’ll handle yourself just fine in an interview situation.
Well trained in the art of social lubrication, Alec then asked us what we were up to in London, and I told him — Greek tragedy, dinosaurs, contemporary dance. His eyes widened in a just-perceptible flinch. He may never have encountered people who actually spend their time doing such things before; the people he mingles with in Finance World don’t have time for such things, I presume, perhaps because there’s no obvious route to material gain from four hours in a theatre, or glass cases full of bones, or movement with no clear meaning.
With great affability, with zero judgement but with obvious bafflement, Alec hoped we had a great time, and looked grateful when we pulled in to his stop. I really hope Alec got to do that interview, and I really hope he nailed it.
I can’t find any royalty-free images of Alex Gerko, so you’ll have to do a Google search to see what he looks like. Once you’ve found him, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether you think Alec was right or not about the similarity.
All I’ll say is, if glasses, dark stubble, and a receding hairline constitute the magic formula for immense wealth, I’m ready for the first bank transfer whenever Fate decides to ask for my sort code and account number.
