Gautam Adani has joined the club of centibillionaires. The Indian entrepreneur, whose empire encompasses ports, mines, and green energy, is the most recent person to have a wealth of $100 billion. He is the world’s greatest gainer this year, up about $24 billion, and joins nine other members of the elite group. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mukesh Ambani, whose net worth originally surpassed that threshold in October, has now dipped slightly below it to $99 billion.
Adani’s meteoric rise has been nothing short of breathtaking. The college dropout who gained his money in the coal sector has nearly doubled his income in the last two years, owing to a pivot to green energy and infrastructure that has secured him financing from corporations like France’s Total SE and Warburg Pincus. According to those familiar with the situation, he’s also looking at prospective partnerships in Saudi Arabia, including the idea of owning a stake in the world’s largest oil exporter.
Is Adani Group thinking something big
His concentration on expanding in areas that Prime Minister Narendra Modi considers critical to nation-building and the achievement of the country’s long-term economic goals is paying off: Since 2020, the value of some Adani Group equities has increased by almost 1,000%. While the world’s richest 500 people added more than $1 trillion to their total fortunes in 2021, Adani, 59, stood out. One of the biggest increases in his net worth was $42.7 billion. He briefly surpassed Mukesh Ambani as Asia’s wealthiest person in February.
Adani and Ambani, the head of the oil-and-petrochemicals conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd., have risen to the top of a wealth ranking dominated by people who made their riches mostly in the United States’ technology industry. Ambani, like Adani, was able to pivot his conglomerate to new areas like as e-commerce and technology, attracting billions of dollars in funding from investors such as Facebook and Google. In recent years, wealth creation has surged. Since Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates in 1999, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. was the first to reach the $100 billion mark in 2017. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Inc. and the world’s richest man with a worth of $273 billion, joined the club in 2020.
