Timur was born in Soviet Alma‑Ata, where his father served as a Communist Party boss in the Kazakh SSR. That background meant he grew up inside the administrative caste that would inherit the country during the 1990s privatisations, rather than outside it trying to claw his way in.

He went to Moscow State University and studied national economic planning, graduating in 1988 just as the Soviet system began to crack. By 1999 he had defended a PhD on how to manage enterprises “in market conditions” using the oil industry as a case study — an academic label for what would soon become his real career: managing the interface between state assets, private profit and the president’s family.

In 1990, Timur married Dinara Nursultanovna Nazarbayeva, middle daughter of Nursultan Nazarbayev, who would serve as Kazakhstan’s president for almost three decades. The marriage turned a well‑connected technocrat into a core member of the First Family, placing him in the Nazarbayev family category alongside other in‑laws who acquired banks, media holdings and mines.

Together Timur and Dinara have three children and are routinely assessed as being worth more than ten billion dollars. Much of that wealth is tied to Halyk Bank — Kazakhstan’s largest lender — and to their downstream interests in oil, gas, logistics and property, but the family balance sheet is too interwoven with state structures for clean separation: the line between what “belongs” to Dinara as a private individual and what flows from Nazarbayev’s presidency is deliberately blurred.

After a stint as a research assistant at a Soviet planning institute, Timur moved into business via the Altyn‑Alma concern and the Almaty Trade and Financial Bank, which he co‑founded in 1995. By the late 1990s he had moved into the heart of the hydrocarbon system: vice president for economics and finance at Kazakhoil, then head of KazTransOil, the national oil‑pipeline company.

Between 2002 and 2005 he served as first vice‑president at KazMunayGas, the state oil champion created by merging Kazakhoil with the transport company, and later became its chairman. Under his watch the company bought an 8.33 percent stake in the North Caspian project from British Gas, securing Kazakh participation in the giant Kashagan field. Official biographies credit him with increasing reserves, diversifying export routes and expanding refining capacity — in other words, with turning the pipeline map into a cash‑flow machine under friendly control.

In parallel to his oil roles, Timur was appointed a freelance adviser to his father‑in‑law, President Nazarbayev, and moved through the top of Kazakhstan’s sovereign‑asset stack. From 2006 he served as deputy chairman of Samruk‑Kazyna, the national welfare fund that bundles stakes in the country’s biggest state‑owned enterprises; by 2008 he was chairman of its board.

As Samruk‑Kazyna’s chief, he also chaired the boards of key subsidiaries: nuclear firm Kazatomprom, rail operator Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, power generator Samruk‑Energo, and grid company KEGOC. For several years, one Nazarbayev son‑in‑law literally sat atop the companies that owned the oil, the uranium, the railways and the transmission lines. When he resigned from Samruk‑Kazyna in December 2011 after unrest in Zhanaozen, it signalled not a retreat from influence but a tactical move amid pressure over how the state‑family nexus had handled labour conflict.

Timur’s influence is not confined within Kazakhstan’s borders. From 2011 until March 2022 he sat on the board of directors of Gazprom, Russia’s giant gas monopoly, a role presented as recognition of his “high professional qualities” and of the importance of Russo‑Kazakh energy cooperation. At home he headed Kazenergy, the association of energy companies and investors, from 2005 to 2023, acting as broker between private capital and the state in the hydrocarbon sector.

Parallel to the oil world he built a second power base in sport. From 2009 he led the Kazakhstan Boxing Federation and later the swimming federation and the golf federation, while serving as president of the National Olympic Committee from 2015 to 2024. Internationally he took seats on the executive committees of the Olympic Council of Asia and the Association of National Olympic Committees, and joined an International Olympic Committee commission. For a decade and a half, the same man who ran pipelines and sovereign assets also oversaw Kazakhstan’s Olympic delegations, boxing medals and sports confederations.

In 2020, journalists at the Financial Times published leaked emails and whistleblower documents alleging that companies linked to Timur’s staff had been used to skim at least tens of millions of dollars from pipeline‑construction contracts paid for by the Kazakh state. The scheme allegedly involved intermediaries marking up equipment and services supplied to state‑owned operators, with the surplus flowing back to offshore vehicles tied to his network. Timur has publicly denied the allegations.

Around the same time, digital‑rights investigations placed his name on lists of potential targets for the Pegasus spyware system circulating in Kazakhstan’s elite circles, underlining both his perceived importance and the internal rivalries around the First Family’s wealth. During the 2022 Kazakh unrest, he and Dinara reportedly lost around 200 million dollars on paper when Halyk Bank shares plunged in London — a reminder that street politics and palace intrigue can sometimes pierce even the thickest oligarchic insulation.

Officially, Timur’s household is the Nazarbayev line: wife Dinara and their three children, plus the family’s controlling stake in Halyk Bank and interests held through holding structures like Almex. Unofficially, the family tree is more entangled. He has two sons from an extramarital relationship with socialite‑businesswoman Goga Ashkenazi, whose own media profile made the affair, and the children, impossible to keep entirely in the shadows.

The family’s real estate portfolio reads like a map of elite boltholes. He owns a mansion in the UK, castles in Switzerland and Germany, and multiple Spanish properties; by 2025 investigative reporters counted eight Spanish assets alone. One high‑profile purchase was Sunninghill Park, the former country house of Prince Andrew, which he bought via intermediaries for about twenty million dollars — roughly four million over the asking price, and with no competing bids — before demolishing it and replacing it with a new fourteen‑bedroom mansion.

The award shelf in the Kulibayev household tells its own story. Over two decades he has collected Kazakhstan’s Order of Kurmet, multiple jubilee medals marking constitutions and independence anniversaries, and both third‑ and first‑class Orders of Barys, alongside the Order of Otan — some of the highest decorations the republic can grant. These formal honours anchor his status as a national “builder” in the official narrative.

From outside Kazakhstan he has received Russia’s Order of Friendship, an “Order of Al‑Fakhr” from the Council of Muftis of Russia, and an order from the Russian Orthodox Church, plus badges such as “Honorary Railwayman” of the CIS. The mix is revealing: secular states, Islamic bodies and Orthodox hierarchies all signalling that the Oil Prince is welcome in their sanctums — a personification of the way Central Asian resource elites thread themselves through every available institution to normalise fortunes born of privatisation and proximity to power.