🇮🇳 Mukesh Ambani

Mukesh was born in 1957 in Aden, where his father Dhirubhai was working as a petrol-pump clerk for Shell. The family came home to a Bhuleshwar chawl in Mumbai when Mukesh was a small boy. Dhirubhai began trading polyester, then weaving it, then refining it, and by the time Mukesh was a teenager the family had moved to a 14-floor building on Altamount Road called Sea Wind, where the elder Ambani lived on the top floor and ran an empire below.

Mukesh attended Hill Grange High School in Pedder Road, then the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai for chemical engineering. He went to Stanford for an MBA in 1979 but dropped out within a year — Dhirubhai called him home to build the polyester plant at Patalganga. He never went back. He built the plant in eighteen months, faster than the licensors said was possible, and learned in that monsoon what later became Reliance gospel: time is the only commodity that cannot be reordered.

He spent the next two decades building the Jamnagar refinery complex in Gujarat, today the largest single-site oil refinery on Earth, processing 1.4 million barrels a day. When Dhirubhai died suddenly of a stroke in 2002 without a written will, the Ambani brothers' war began — a public, ugly, mother-mediated split that finally divided the group in 2005. Mukesh kept oil, gas, refining, and a clause that forbade either brother from entering the other's businesses. Anil, his younger brother, took telecom, power, and entertainment. Anil's empire eventually collapsed. Mukesh's swallowed the gap.

In 2010, when the non-compete clause expired, Mukesh bought a small spectrum holding called Infotel for $1 billion and began the most expensive consumer-tech build in Asian history. By 2016, when he launched Jio, he had laid 250,000 kilometers of fibre, built 100,000 4G towers, and stockpiled six months of free data. The launch detonated the Indian telecom market. Within four years, two of the three incumbents had merged in defence, one had gone bankrupt, and Jio had 400 million subscribers.

Jio did more than crash data prices. It put Aadhaar-linked smartphones, UPI payments, and JioMart groceries within reach of the country's bottom half, accelerated the cashless transition, and made India the world's largest data consumer per capita. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta paid $5.7 billion for a piece of Jio in 2020. Google followed with $4.5 billion. KKR, Silver Lake, Mubadala, and Saudi Arabia's PIF lined up behind them.

Antilia, finished in 2010 on Altamount Road, is six floors of car parks, a fifty-seat cinema, a glass-and-marble temple, a snow room, three helipads, and a ballroom — vertical because Mumbai land is scarcer than oxygen. The Forbes-tracked construction cost was somewhere between one and two billion dollars; Ambani has never confirmed. The family of five lives on the upper floors. Tata's Ratan Tata once called it 'an embarrassment to Indian inequality'. Ambani did not respond.

His three children — Akash, Isha, and Anant — now run, respectively, Jio, Reliance Retail, and the new energy and gas business. The 2024 pre-wedding celebration for Anant in Jamnagar ran four days, cost an estimated $150 million, and featured performances by Rihanna, Beyoncé-adjacent guest lists, and Mark Zuckerberg in a Sabyasachi sherwani.

At 67, Mukesh wakes at five, walks the perimeter of the Antilia roof gardens, eats poha for breakfast, and is in the office on Maker Chambers IV by eight. He is teetotal, vegetarian, and reportedly has not taken a personal vacation longer than four days since 2002.