Britannica Money (2024)

Mukesh Ambani (born April 19, 1957, Aden, Yemen) is an Indian business mogul who serves as chairman and managing director of the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a multinational conglomerate with businesses across sectors such as petrochemicals, energy, textiles, retail, and telecommunications. With a net worth of $117.5 billion as of March 4, 2024, Ambani is Asia’s wealthiest person. He ranked among the top 10 wealthiest people in the world on Forbes magazine’s annual list of billionaires in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Ambani is one of four children of renowned Indian industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani, who first worked as a gas station attendant in Aden, Yemen. Because of the increasingly unstable political climate in Aden, where Mukesh Ambani was born, the family relocated in 1958 to the Bhuleshwar neighborhood of Bombay (now Mumbai), where they lived in a chawl (a communal building that commonly features low-rent two-room apartments). That same year Dhirubhai Ambani and a cousin founded the Reliance Commercial Corporation, which grew into RIL from a commodities-trading business that they initially operated out of a one-room rental space.

Education and early professional life

Mukesh Ambani earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Bombay (now the University of Mumbai) and subsequently pursued a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University. However, he left the program in 1981 to join the family business, where he worked to diversify the company, venturing into a vast array of areas, including communications, infrastructure, petrochemicals, petroleum refining, polyester fibers, and gas and oil production.

The Ambani brothers’ feuds

Following Dhirubhai Ambani’s death in 2002, Mukesh Ambani and his brother, Anil Ambani, assumed joint leadership of the Reliance companies. However, the brothers’ feuds over control prompted their mother, Kokilaben Ambani, to split Reliance’s assets via a noncompetition agreement (2006–10) under which Mukesh Ambani assumed control of the gas, oil, and petrochemicals units as RIL under the umbrella of the Reliance Group. Anil Ambani gained control of the telecommunications, power generation, and financial services.

Expansion of RIL

Mukesh Ambani has been credited with commissioning the globe’s largest start-up petroleum refinery at Jamnagar, Gujarat state, in 1999, as well as spearheading the creation of several state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities that vastly increased RIL’s production capabilities. Another refinery was added close to the first Jamnagar refinery in 2008. Two years earlier Ambani led the development of Reliance Retail—a retail network comprising both physical and online stores, claimed by Reliance to be India’s largest retailer. Reliance Retail’s customer base reached 249 million in the 2023 fiscal year.

Ambani’s multiple business successes include the purchase of the Mumbai Indians, an Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team, through a Reliance subsidiary in 2008. The Mumbai Indians were the only IPL team to grow in brand value in 2020 despite empty stadiums in a pandemic-hit world. It retained its position as the most valuable IPL brand in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

In 2010 the two Reliance groups owned by Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani mutually scrapped the noncompetition agreement signed in 2006, and later that decade Mukesh Ambani established Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of RIL dedicated to telecommunications and e-commerce. The Jio brand offered India’s first nationwide network for 4G broadband service in 2016. By August 2023, Jio’s customer base had crossed 450 million, and its 5G customers numbered more than 50 million. About this time, Ambani declared that Jio will be among the first companies globally to develop 6G capabilities.

February 2024 saw Ambani’s RIL enter into an agreement with Indian media company Viacom18 and American entertainment giant Disney to create a joint venture, valued at $8.5 billion, forming one of India’s leading media companies. This joint venture aims to provide entertainment and sports coverage to more than 750 million viewers and will have exclusive rights to distribute Disney productions in India. Nita Ambani, Mukesh Ambani’s wife, is set to become the chair of the joint venture.

Family and residence

Mukesh Ambani is married to Nita Ambani, an educationist, a businessperson, and a champion of women’s and children’s rights. She is a member of the International Olympic Committee; founder and chair of Reliance Foundation, RIL’s philanthropic arm; and manager of the high-value IPL team the Mumbai Indians. The billionaire couple lives in Antilia, their luxury home along South Mumbai’s Altamount Road, one of the most expensive addresses in the world. In fact, Antilia is one of the most expensive homes in the world. This ostentatious 400,000-square-foot (37,000-square-meter) residence has 27 floors, a temple, a salon, a private movie theater, a garage that can accommodate 168 cars, a car service station, and a snow room to help the family stay cool in the humid Mumbai summers.

Together Mukesh and Nita Ambani have three children—twins, Akash and Isha, and a younger son, Anant. The three Ambani children joined Reliance as board directors in August 2023. Akash Ambani heads Jio Infocomm; Isha Ambani is tasked with driving the expansion of Reliance Retail into newer formats and areas; and Anant Ambani is leading the Reliance Group’s energy and materials businesses, helping Reliance on its path to becoming a net-zero carbon company by 2035. Anant Ambani’s marriage to Radhika Merchant, board director of her father Viren Merchant’s Encore Healthcare, in July 2024, and the pre-wedding festivities that started in early March have grabbed headlines in India. The pre-wedding celebrations in Jamnagar featured a performance by pop star Rihanna, and the guest list included the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan, Bill Gates, Sundar Pichai, Bollywood stars Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan, and Indian billionaires Gautam Adani and Kumar Mangalam Birla. This lavish event in March was followed by a luxury cruise from Italy to France in June—an extravaganza that included Bollywood and cricket celebrities in the guest list and performances by pop singer Katy Perry and the Backstreet Boys, the popular boy band from the 1990s. Between the cruise in June and the wedding on the July 12 weekend, the Ambani family organized a performance by Canadian singer Justin Bieber in Mumbai. The wedding is expected to be attended by the likes of former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, Indian actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas and her musician husband Nick Jonas, American television personality Kim Kardashian, and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.

Other achievements

Mukesh Ambani was chosen in 2006 to cochair the India Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum (WEF)—an international organization made up of some of the world’s prominent business leaders, politicians, policymakers, scholars, philanthropists, trade unionists, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations that convenes annually to discuss global commerce, economic development, political concerns, and important social issues. In 2010 he was elected to serve as a member of the WEF Foundation Board.

Ambani was ranked number one among Indian CEOs and number two globally in the Brand Guardianship Index by Brand Finance for two consecutive years, 2023 and 2024. He also topped India Today’s “The High & Mighty 2023: 50 Power People” list. That same year he was among the top 10 in The Indian Express’s list of the most powerful Indians.

Ambani became India’s first rupee trillionaire in 2007, and that year The Economic Times newspaper and the news agency Press Trust of India simultaneously named him the world’s richest man. In January 2024 Forbes India named Ambani, with a net worth at the time of $96.4 billion, the richest person in Asia. He was featured in Forbes magazine’s annual billionaires list as one of the 10 richest people in the world in 2021, 2022, and 2023.