9 bold predictions made by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner

At 54, Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner has earned his place among the elite venture capitalists.

He’s gotten in on the ground floor of some of the biggest companies in tech, elevating his new worth to about $3 billion.

But as a trained physicist and a person who thinks on a global scale, his predictions vault far beyond Silicon Valley.

Here are nine of the most amazing predictions he’s made over the past few years.

This article was written by Alexandra Ossola from Popular Science and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

1) Social media will be huge.

Milner first made headlines in 2009 when he invested $200 million in a little startup called Facebook.

That gamble ended up being worth $2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

His company, DST Global, invested another $400 million in Twitter in 2011, and $125 million into WhatsApp.

He told the New York Times that he had a hunch that social media could be a powerful force, after watching the print market get weaker Russia in the late 2000s.

“At the time, I was probably the best-informed person in the world about social networking monetization,” he said.

2) Physicists should earn as much as athletes.

Trained as a physicist himself, Milner believes that science is one of the things that makes us uniquely human.

In his opinion, the most innovative scientists weren’t doing enough.

So he, along with tech gurus Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Ma, created the Breakthrough Prize.

First awarded in 2012, the winning researchers receive $3 million to continue their work.

“I wanted this amount to be meaningful,” Milner told Reuters in 2012.

“I think top scientists need to be compensated at a different scale in society. Somebody with experience will tell you that true scientists are not motivated by money – they are motivated by the quest itself. That is true. But I think an additional recognition will not hurt.”

3) Online companies are more efficient.

“Big Internet companies on average are capable of generating revenue of $1 million per employee, and that compares to 10 to 20 percent of that which is normally generated by traditional offline businesses of comparable size,” Milner said during a presentation at the Yalta Annual Meeting in September 2011.

That’s an efficiency that’s not going away, he said, citing the example that one engineer at Facebook can support about a million users.

The downside, though, is that when “inefficient” brick-and-mortar businesses go bankrupt, middle-class people lose their jobs, as Reuters points out.

Milner estimated then that 20 percent of retail sales will be done online by 2020.

It looks like we might not hit that mark—in the final quarter of 2015, ecommerce accounted for 7.3 percent of total commerce sales, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

And, bizarrely, some online retailers like Amazon are going back and building physical stores.

Milner might not have been right on the money for this prediction, but there’s no denying that online sales continue to grow.