War & Peace Quote by Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Power has quietly migrated from capital to competence, and Khodorkovsky is pointing at the awkward part: owners still like to imagine themselves as the indispensable protagonists, yet the real leverage often sits with the people who can actually run the machine.

The first sentence is bait. In the old story, ownership guarantees superiority: you take the risk, you reap the reward, you sit at the top of the hierarchy. Khodorkovsky flips that moral math. If a manager can command a higher paycheck than the owner’s take, the “owner” starts looking less like a master and more like a landlord collecting rent in a market where tenants can move. The implication isn’t just that management is hard; it’s that modern firms are so complex, regulated, and globally entangled that operational knowledge becomes scarcer than money.

Then comes the sharper subtext: owners aren’t simply paying for talent, they’re competing for it. “Fight each other” suggests a labor market where prestige and equity can’t fully substitute for capability, and where loyalty is transactional. It’s a warning to oligarchic instincts - wealth alone doesn’t guarantee control if execution lives elsewhere.

Khodorkovsky’s biography gives the line extra voltage. As a post-Soviet tycoon who learned how quickly political structures can reassign “ownership,” he’s attuned to the fragility of property and the realpolitik of influence. In that light, the quote doubles as a critique of old-guard capitalism: if you can’t attract and keep skilled managers, you don’t really own the business; you just hold the papers.