The Indian businessman Gautam Adani, who shot to the top of the wealth rankings this year, has passed Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH, to become the second-richest person in the world. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, kept the top spot with a wealth of more than $270 billion, while Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, dropped to fourth place after seeing his fortune dip by $2.3 billion to a total worth of $149.7 billion. Contrarily, Gautam Adani, who occupied second place on Friday in Forbes’ Real-Time billionaire rankings, has a net worth of $155.5 billion.
major source of earnings is his Adani Group, the chairman and creator of a global conglomerate with offices in Ahmedabad and engaged in port operations and development in India. Adani’s wife Priti Adani also serves as the president of the Adani Foundation. Adani, who was 14th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index at the start of the year, is now second only to Elon Musk in wealth ($263.9 billion) with a fortune of $146.8 billion. Some of his group companies have soared by more than 1,000% since 2020, and shares of his flagship Adani Enterprises Ltd. reached a new high this week.
After a new tech selloff rocked the fortunes of the wealthiest Americans on Friday, Bezos now just $19 million behind Adani. The change in wealth rankings may only be temporary, and it is mostly based on the performance of shares of Amazon.com Inc., which are down 26% this year.
Bill Gates and France’s Bernard Arnault have been surpassed by Adani, who in February overtook India’s Mukesh Ambani as the richest Asian. Adani became a 100-billionaire in April. The wealth index, which until now has been dominated by US IT entrepreneurs, has never seen a person from Asia score so highly.
Adani Enterprises, Adani’s conglomerate, achieved a record high of 3,749.15 rupees ($46) per share yesterday, more than tripling from the previous year. Adani Power’s shares have surged by a factor of three over the previous year in response to the increasing demand for power, hitting 398.4 rupees ($4.9). Adani Green Energy, a renewable energy supplier, had its share price nearly quadrupled in the previous year to 2,343.05 rupees ($29.2).
Last years, the corporation has built an ambitious renewable energy sector and has also moved into petrochemicals, cement, data centers, and copper refining.
Rumors have circulated that the billionaire’s business will soon compete with Ambani’s Reliance Industries in industries that it already controls as a result of recent investments in Indian news media and this year’s bid for 5G airwaves.
However, Adani’s fast entry into capital-intensive industries has prompted money concerns. This week, Fitch Group subsidiary CreditSights indicated that they “remain worried about the Adani Group’s indebtedness.”
Gautam Adani’s development drive has pushed him to undertake ambitious efforts to join new firms, which has been the secret to his swift success. The firm is nearing completion of its $10.5 billion acquisition of Holcim Group’s Indian branch. As part of this agreement, Adani Group would purchase shares in two publicly traded cement businesses, Ambuja Cement (63.11%) and ACC (54.53%). These transactions, for which open bidding ended last week, would raise Adani to the country’s second-largest cement maker.
Aggressive acquisition bid was made by Adani’s media firm for the channel New Delhi Television (NDTV), which is frequently viewed as being anti-government. For 1.14 billion rupees ($14.3 million), Adani Group’s AMG Media Networks (AMNL) acquired Vishva Pradhan Commercial, giving it a 29.2% stake in NDTV. Another big wager is on renewable energy, with Adani New Industries, its utility division, promising to invest $50 billion over the next ten years in the development of green energy.
