Bernard Arnault leaves the podium. The French billionaire who was part of the top 3 of the largest fortunes on the planet for several years has just been surpassed. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the LVMH boss is now, at an estimated $136 billion, the fourth richest person on the planet.
It is not Bill Gates or Warren Buffet who precedes him in the ranking. The third fortune in the world is a businessman who does not enjoy great notoriety in the West. This is Gautam Adani, a 60-year-old Indian whose wealth is estimated by Bloomberg at $137 billion.
Over the past year, this industrial founder of the Adani conglomerate has been by far the richest billionaire on the planet. His wealth jumped $60.9 billion when at the same time Bernard Arnault “lost” $42 billion, Elon Musk $19 billion, and Jeff Bezos $39 billion.
Gautam Adani’s fortune has grown exponentially since the health crisis. His estate went from less than $6 billion in March 2020 to almost $80 billion in mid-2021 before experiencing some shocks and burning again in recent months to exceed $130 billion.
At 16, he grades diamonds.
At the beginning of the year, having become the richest person in Asia ahead of his compatriot Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani multiplies the bailouts by going into debt to increase the valuation of his conglomerate. The Adani group, now valued at $240bn, owns a dozen commercial ports, is active in coal, electricity, renewables and made a hostile bid last week to pay Indian media giant New Delhi Television (NDTV). .
Born in 1962 in Ahmedabad, in eastern India, Adani comes from a modest family of seven children with a small textile merchant. This self-taught man who left his studies without a diploma in his pocket worked from the age of 16 at the diamond merchant Mahendra Brothers where he was in charge of classifying precious stones.
In the early 1980s, he joined his brother at a plastics company where he quickly took over as chief operating officer. The company is experiencing rapid growth with the development of new plastics such as PVC. In the early 1990s, he branched out from what has since become Adani Enterprises into metals and textiles.
It was in 1995 when the Adani clan took on a new dimension by taking over the management of the port of Mundra, on the Arabian Sea, which became the country’s first commercial port. With that manna, Adani buys ports, airports and deploys in electricity, coal and renewable energies. A rescue bulimia hailed in the stock market with a price multiplied by more than 20 in two years. But increasingly in debt, the group now worries analysts who fear the Indian billionaire has had eyes bigger than his stomach in recent years.
Source: BFM TV
