It’s the first time an Asian person Gautam Adani has broken into the top three of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ..
With a $137.4 billion fortune, Adani has overtaken France’s Bernard Arnault and now trails just Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos of the US in the ranking.
Even fellow asians Mukesh Ambani and China’s Jack Ma of Alibaba fame never made it that far
Close aide of Gujarat origin Prime minister Modi , emerged the business man from Gujarat , who isa college dropout who first tried his luck as a diamond trader before turning to coal, this week became the world’s third-richest person.
Adani, 60, has spent the past few years expanding his coal-to-ports conglomerate, venturing into everything from data centers to cement, media and alumina.
Thanks to Indian government patronage Adani group now owns India’s largest private-sector port and airport operator, city-gas distributor and coal miner.
While its Carmichael mine in Australia has been criticized by environmentalists, it pledged in November to invest $70 billion in green energy to become the world’s largest renewable-energy producer.
While his empire has expanded to one of the world’s largest conglomerates fueling the remarkable gains in wealth, concerns have grown over the rapid growth.
Adani’s deals spree has been predominantly funded with debt and his empire is “deeply over-leveraged,” CreditSights said in a report this month.
Many lawmakers and market watchers have also raised concerns over opaque shareholder structures and a lack of analyst coverage at Adani Group companies.
Inspite this Adani shares have soared some of them more than 1,000% since 2020, with valuations hitting 750 times earnings as the tycoon focused on areas that Prime Minister Narendra Modi deems crucial to meeting India’s long-term goals.
Industry insiders criticise many of the government of India decisions are passed secretly to Gautam Adani and this help them to score when other in the industry bleeds during the time of corona
Green energy and infrastructure has won investments from firms including Warburg Pincus and TotalEnergies SE, raise eyebrows as Adani enter the echelons normal dominated by US tech moguls.
He first overtook Ambani as the richest Asian in February, became a centibillionaire in April and surpassed Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates as the world’s fourth-richest person last month.
Adani was able to move past some of the world’s richest US billionaires partly because they’ve recently boosted their philanthropy.
Gates said in July he was transferring $20 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, while Warren Buffett has already donated more than $35 billion to the charity.
The two, along with Gates’s ex-wife Melinda French Gates, started the Giving Pledge initiative in 2010, vowing to give away most of their fortunes in their lifetimes.
The billions of dollars spent on philanthropy has pushed them lower on the Bloomberg wealth ranking. They’re now fifth and 164th, respectively.
However Adani companies CSR a obligation on the part of companies in confirmation with Indian laws is still remain unclear
The most controversy is repeated landing of narcotics in again port at Gujarat . In the same period Adani has also added $60.9 billion to his fortune in 2022 alone, five times more than anyone else.
