India’s business personality and top richest person Mukesh Ambani has now joined Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk after crossing the $100 billion wealth club, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani, 64, is an Indian billionaire businessman, and the chairman, managing director, and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Ltd., a Fortune Global 500 company and India’s most valuable company by market value.
Ambani entered the rarefied group of 11 men as his conglomerate’s stock climbed to a record on Friday. He’s now worth $100.6 billion after his wealth increased by $23.8 billion this year.
Since inheriting the oil-refining and petrochemicals businesses of his late father Dhirubhai Ambani’s empire in 2005, Ambani has been seeking to transform the energy giant into retail, technology, and e-commerce titan.
His telecommunications unit, which started services in 2016, is now the dominant carrier in the Indian market. His retail and technology ventures raised about $27 billion last year, selling stakes to investors ranging from Facebook Inc. and Google to KKR & Co. and Silver Lake.
Ambani unveiled an ambitious push into green energy in June, with a planned investment of about $10 billion over three years. And last month, the mogul said his company would “aggressively” pursue production of cheaper green hydrogen. The plan aligns with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitions of turning India into a global manufacturing hub for cleaner fuel to combat climate change and slash energy imports by the world’s third-biggest oil consumer.
Who is Mukesh Ambani? (Source: Britannica)
Mukesh Ambani was one of four children of Dhirubhai Ambani, who first worked as a gas-station attendant. Owing to the increasingly unstable political climate in Aden, the family relocated in 1958 to the Bhuleshwar neighbourhood of Bombay (now Mumbai), where they lived in a chawl (a communal building that commonly features low-rent two-room apartments). In the same year, Dhirubhai and a cousin founded the Reliance Commercial Corporation, which grew from a commodities-trading business that they initially operated out of a one-room rental space into RIL.
Ambani earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Bombay (now the University of Mumbai) and subsequently pursued a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University. However, he left the program in 1981 to join the family business, where he worked to diversify the company, venturing into a vast array of areas, including communications, infrastructure, petrochemicals, petroleum refining, polyester fibres, and gas and oil production. In 2004 he was named one of the world’s most respected business leaders by the professional-services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Following Dhirubhai’s death in 2002, Ambani and his brother, Anil, assumed joint leadership of the Reliance companies. However, feuds between the brothers over control prompted their mother, Kokilaben Ambani, to split Reliance’s assets via a noncompetition agreement (2006–10) under which Mukesh assumed control of the gas, oil, and petrochemicals units as RIL under the umbrella of the Reliance Group. Ambani has been credited with creating the globe’s largest start-up petroleum refinery as well as spearheading the creation of several state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities that vastly increased RIL’s production capabilities.
In 2006 he was chosen to cochair the India Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum (WEF)—an international organization made up of some of the world’s prominent business leaders, politicians, policy makers, scholars, philanthropists, trade unionists, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations that convenes annually to discuss global commerce, economic development, political concerns, and important social issues. The following year he became India’s first rupee trillionaire.
In 2007 The Economic Times newspaper and the news agency Press Trust of India simultaneously named Ambani the world’s richest man. The following year he created the Mumbai Indians, an Indian Premier League cricket team. In 2010 he was elected to serve as a member of the WEF Foundation Board.
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