Since March 2020, shares of the company’s flagship Adani Enterprises have increased by more than 2,700 percent and become the richest person in the world.
MUMBAI: On the Forbes real-time billionaire tracker, Indian businessman Gautam Adani momentarily overtook the wealthiest person in the world on Friday, weeks after becoming the first Asian to enter the top three.
According to Forbes, the self-made billionaire’s net worth increased $4 billion overnight to $154 billion, placing him ahead of Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Bernard Arnault of LVMH.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, maintained a commanding lead with a net worth of more than $270 billion and at the No. 1 richest person in the world.
Arnault — who alternately held the number one slot in May 2021 — and Adani swapped the second spot throughout the day as the share values of their respective firms changed.
Adani, 60, built his fortune in ports and commodity trading and now runs the second-largest conglomerate in India, with businesses that include edible oil production, coal mining, airports, and the news media.
His skyrocketing net worth is a result of his publicly traded firms’ market capitalization skyrocketing as investors support the Adani Group’s rapid growth of both existing and new enterprises.
Shares in the company’s flagship, Adani Enterprises, in which the billionaire holds a 75% stake, have increased in value by a factor of two and a half since March 2020.
This year, Adani outperformed fellow Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani thanks to stock price increases at other group firms including Adani Transmission, Adani Power, Adani Ports, and Adani Green Energy.
Analyst predictions suggested that on Friday morning, the market capitalization of the seven listed Adani firms momentarily surpassed that of the Tata group, creating Adani Group India’s largest conglomerate.
Adani, who was raised in a middle-class family in the western state of Gujarat’s metropolis of Ahmedabad, dropped out of college to work in the diamond trade before launching his export company in 1988.
He was awarded a contract in 1995 to construct and run a commercial shipping port in Gujarat’s Mundra, which has subsequently expanded to become India’s largest port.
Adani expanded at the same time into coal mining and thermal power generation in India and abroad.
In recent years, the conglomerate has established a renewable energy company with lofty goals, as well as ventured into petrochemicals, cement, data centers, and copper refining.
Recent investments in Indian news media and a bid for 5G airwaves this year have stoked rumors that the billionaire’s conglomerate may soon challenge Ambani’s Reliance Industries in industries it now dominates.
However, Adani’s quick entry into capital-intensive industries has also sparked financial concerns. Last week, CreditSights, a division of Fitch Group, reiterated that they “remain worried over the Adani Group’s leverage.”
