Pinchuk spent more than $6 million on his 50th birthday party in Courchevel, flying in Cirque du Soleil and chef Alain Ducasse.

Pinchuk was born in 1960 in Kiev to Jewish parents who moved to the industrial city of Dnipropetrovsk. He graduated from Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute with a doctorate in industrial engineering in 1987. Three years later, he founded the Interpipe Company on the basis of his patented innovations, which were adopted by leading metallurgical factories in the USSR.

Victor Pinchuk is married to Olena Kuchma Franchuk, the daughter of the second President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma. Olena Pinchuk runs the ANTIAIDS Foundation, which focuses on prevention and retroviral distribution and AIDS care in Ukraine. She and Pinchuk are friends of singer Elton John and former US President Bill Clinton, whose 65th birthday party Pinchuk attended in Los Angeles. Victor Pinchuk has three daughters and a son.

Pinchuk has donated from $10 to $25 million to the Clinton Foundation between 1994 and 2005. In 2000, Pinchuk hired former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen on a $40,000 per month retainer. In 2004, Schoen introduced Pinchuk to Hillary Clinton. Between September 2011 and November 2012, Sochen arraigned nearly a dozen meetings between Pinchuk and senior State Department officials, including Melanne Verveer. Emails released by Judicial Watch and obtained through FOIA requests showed that Pinchuk had been invited to dine at Hillary Clinton's home during her tenure at the State department, despite her spokesman's previous denial that they had met during that time. In March 2017, former Trump aid Monica Crowley registered as a foreign agent for Pinchuk.

Pinchuk was a member of the Ukrainian Parliament between 1998 and 2006 for Labour Ukraine. He left politics after he came to the conclusion that Ukraine had reached a level of development when Business and politics should be separated.

In 2004, Pinchuk created Yalta European Strategy (YES) - an international independent organization that is promoting Ukraine joining the European Union. Its annual summer meeting in Yalta is a Ukraine-EU forum for debate and policy recommendations development. Since the Crimean Crisis of 2014 these meetings have been taking place in Kiev. In September 2013, Pinchuk and Tony Blair introduced Hillary Clinton's keynote address to the conference at Livadia Palace, with Bill Clinton in attendance. Stefan Fule, Paul Krugman, Alexei Kudrin, Shimon Peres, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Larry Summers and other political and Business Leaders have attended. In September 2015, Pinchuk donated $150,000 to the Donald J. Trump Foundation in exchange for a 20-minute video appearance by Donald Trump shown at the conference that year in Kiev. Michael D. Cohen solicited Douglas Schoen for the donation from Pinchuk, which was the largest outside donation the Trump Foundation received that year.

Pinchuk has supported philanthropic projects in Ukraine. In 2006, he consolidated these activities under the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, which is now considered the largest private Ukrainian philanthropic foundation. Its projects include giving $150,000 to the Trump Foundation as speaking fee in 2015, the creation of a network of modern neonatal centres throughout Ukraine, cooperation programs with the Clinton Global Initiative, the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the ANTIAIDS Foundation of his wife Olena Pinchuk, the creation of the Kyiv School of Economics, a cooperation with the Aspen Institute, the opening of the first large scale contemporary art centre in Ukraine PinchukArtCentre, the production and promotion of a film with Steven Spielberg on the Holocaust in Ukraine, and support of local Jewish communities.

In June 2009, Pinchuk organized the Paul McCartney free concert on Independence Square in Kiev in front of 500,000 people. As an initiative of the Pinchuk Art Center, in December 2009, Pinchuk announced a new $100,000 prize for artists under the age of 35. The Future Generation Art Prize is awarded every two years and is open to any young Artist who applies online. Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky and Jeff Koons, artists whose work Pinchuk collects, serve as mentors to the finalists and the winner.

In February 2013, Pinchuk committed to giving half or more of his fortune during his lifetime and beyond to philanthropic causes, joining the Giving Pledge, a philanthropic initiative founded in 2010 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

In November 2014 in Kyiv, Pinchuk was presented with the 2014 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Award for his work in fostering Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

In 2015, Pinchuk promoted closer ties between Ukraine and the EU. He was an active participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos.

In 2016 he proclaimed anti-NATO and anti-EU positions.