Adani's net worth has nearly doubled
Billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani has become Asia’s richest person.
According to Forbes’ Real Time Billionaires, Adani has a net worth of $90.7 billion.
He overtakes Mukesh Ambani ($89.2 billion) to become the richest Asian.
Adani is also the 10th richest person in the world. Tesla boss Elon Musk is currently top, with a net worth of $232.3 billion.
It is a meteoric rise for Adani, a college dropout who started a commodity export firm in 1988.
In 2008, he first appeared on Forbes’ World Billionaires List, worth $9.3 billion.
His Adani Group includes several businesses ranging from power generation and transmission to edible oil to real estate and coal.
The group has six listed companies in India. The most valuable is Adani Green Energy Ltd, whose shares have increased by 77% over the past year.
Since April 2021, Adani’s net worth has nearly doubled from $50.5 billion.
During the same period, Ambani’s net worth increased by just 6.5% from $84.5 billion.
On February 3, 2022, shares of Reliance Industries, which has oil, petrochemicals, retail and telecom businesses, fell 1.47%. So far in 2022, they are down 2.3%.
Gautam Adani is from Ahmedabad in Gujarat.
He was at Gujarat University, studying commerce. But he dropped out after the second year.
The businessman founded Adani Enterprises as a commodities exporter in 1988.
He eventually expanded his businesses into managing ports, power generation and solar power.
Adani Group’s growth appears to have been supported by Narendra Modi, who prior to becoming Indian Prime Minister was chief minister of the state of Gujarat.
In 2014, Modi was a guest at Adani’s son’s wedding.
In September 2020, Adani Group acquired a 74% stake in India’s second busiest airport, Mumbai International Airport.
While Gautam Adani has overtaken Mukesh Ambani to become Asia’s richest person, both now have higher net worths than Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
On February 3, 2022, Zuckerberg lost over $29 billion in net worth as his company, Meta, saw a decline of at least 26%, eroding over $200 billion.
This followed the company reporting its first-ever fall in Facebook users.
This was the steepest single-day decline in the market value of a US-based firm so far.
The fall has made Zuckerberg the world’s 12th richest man, according to Forbes.
In India, it was reported that the country’s richest more than doubled their fortunes amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
But India’s poverty worsened.
In 2021, India added another 40 billionaires to its current list of 142, who have almost $720 billion in combined fortune.
According to the Oxfam Davos report, this is more than the poorest 40% of the population.
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