Fabergé’s Gamble: A Tech Mogul Chases an Imperial Ghost
A Russian investor tries to resurrect Fabergé’s imperial magic — chasing an egg, a legacy and a clientele that treats history like currency.
Sergei Mosunov walks into London’s luxury scene with the swagger of a man buying a ghost. Fabergé — the name that once glittered across the Russian imperial court — has been adrift for a century, drifting from revolution to fragrance shelves. Mosunov thinks he can pull it back to life. Maybe even launch it into space.
He’s courting the global elite the way Carl Fabergé once courted tsars. Gulf royals. Tech barons. British nobles with steady cameras pointed at them. He’s even imagining a gleaming space-themed egg riding a SpaceX rocket. For the Gulf, he’s sketching something with an “Islamic soul,” hoping it lands in a museum, not a vault.
But first, he wants the 1913 Winter Egg — a frost-shell masterpiece locked away in a Qatari collection. It hits Christie’s in December with a price tag that could rival the modern brand itself. He’s already bracing for disappointment.
Fabergé’s legend was built on obsession — craftsmanship so precise it looked enchanted. Mosunov knows this is the one thing he cannot buy. Money will cover workshops in London, Germany, maybe the US and China. It will fund his two-track strategy: the grand, heirloom-grade Heritage line and the experimental Code line meant to drag the brand into the future. It will not buy taste.
And taste is where he already stumbles. Behind closed Telegram chats, he’s shrugged off the brand’s recent collections as misshapen, unfocused. In front of cameras, he refused to pose beside them. He wants Fabergé to feel imperial again, but on his terms.
His own past trails him — defence-tech origins, political dust-ups in Nizhny Novgorod, protests, a sudden relocation to London. He brushes off associations with Russia’s cultural repatriation push. He calls himself “a small collector.” But the story humming beneath him is bigger. Russia claims its lost symbols. Mosunov claims Fabergé.
Now he hunts an egg that once dazzled a tsar. If he wins it, he’ll hold a piece of the past. What he does not know is whether the past still wants him — or whether Fabergé, after a century of misfires, can shimmer again without the empire that made it legendary.
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