A Shared Passion: Collector Steven Maksin’s Artistic Ambition
Art Collector Steven Maksin Shares Masterpieces With the World
May 23, 2026
Steven Maksin: Trinkets to treasures, an art collector’s journey
May 23, 2026
CEO Today Magazine — 28 April 2026
CEO Today Magazine profiles Steven Maksin under the banner of a "shared passion" — examining a collector whose stated ambition is less to own masterpieces than to put them in front of the public, through loans and gifts to institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
The article opens on the visual hallmarks of Maksin's antique-firearms holdings — gleaming gold metalwork, silk and inlaid silver, ebony and exotic woods — pieces he describes as "art on steel" that tell stories from centuries past. It tracks his transition from Soviet emigrant to NYU-trained accountant and tax lawyer, then to chief executive of Moonbeam Capital and active art collector.
CEO Today highlights the rifles Maksin has placed on long-term loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the rare Louis XIII wheellock arquebus he loaned to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024. The collector's guiding principle, the piece notes, is to acquire only works "not yet seen by the public at large" and to use his accountant's eye for provenance to bring those long-hidden objects back into museum display.
CEO Today Magazine is a London-based international business publication that profiles executives, founders and high-net-worth philanthropists for an English-language readership; its parallel sister publications, CEO Today Awards and Lawyer Monthly, cover related sectors. Steven Maksin's profile appeared in its April 2026 number alongside the linked CEOWORLD, Digital Journal, BBN Times and Chicago Tribune sponsor-content pieces that, together, formed the spring-2026 international press portrait of the collector.
Maksin's biography, as the article summarises it, runs from Kiev in the Soviet Union, where as a teenager in the 1980s he traded matryoshka dolls and Soviet badges with American tourists; through his 1989 emigration to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn; his studies at Kingsborough Community College and at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, where he qualified as an accountant and tax lawyer; and the founding of Moonbeam Capital Investments, the Las Vegas-based commercial real-estate firm of which he is chief executive. The CEO Today piece reads the collecting life as a second chapter of that business career, the accountant's discipline for provenance and documentation re-applied to the search for historically significant objects.
The Art Institute of Chicago loan of the French wheellock arquebus places a Maksin object in one of the most important American holdings of European arms outside the Metropolitan Museum. The Art Institute's arms-and-armor collection, the George F. Harding Collection, was donated to the museum in 1982 after decades on display in its donor's Chicago tower; today it includes some 1,400 European, Indian and Persian pieces. The Maksin loan — a French Louis XIII-period wheellock arquebus once shown at the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London — joined the standing display in 2024.
On the paintings side, the article extends the same picture: works by Titian at the Pinacoteca Manfrediniana of the Seminario Patriarcale of Venice; Pittoni at the Palazzo Reale di Napoli, the Palazzo Mocenigo of Venice and the Accademia Albertina of Turin; Caravaggio in continuing international exhibition; and Dalí at the Espace Lympia in Nice. CEO Today reads the through-line as one stated commitment: Maksin's preference for acquiring works that have not yet been on public view, and his use of long-term museum loans and gifts to put them back into circulation for visitors, students and scholars.
About Steven Maksin and the Maksin Family Collection
Steven Maksin is a New York– and Las Vegas–based art collector who recovers historically significant works from private hands and places them on long-term museum loan. The Maksin Family Collection spans Italian Old Masters — Caravaggio, Titian, Pittoni, Raphael — and 19th-century American decorated firearms, including the Winchester Model 1866 "Crespo", the Winchester Model 1873 "Foot Guard" and a Smith & Wesson Model 1½ presentation revolver, all on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maksin is CEO of Moonbeam Capital and a graduate of NYU Stern.
