Mukesh Ambani: Asia’s richest person

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Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack.

I'm the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Sing.

I'm a a journalist, author and podcaster.

And this week's billionaire is the richest person in India.

Mukesh Ambani worth a staggering $115 billion.

He is the person who funded a truly lavish wedding, which you may have seen pictures of recently.

Yeah, Rihanna was the wedding act.

Kim Kardashian, Boris Johnson, Tony Blair, Mark Zuckerberg, they were all there.

It cost a cool $600 million.

That is quite a wedding bash.

And $20 million of that was spent on flowers.

You're kidding.

How can you spend $20 million on flowers?

It's a lot of flowers.

A 5,000-person main wedding, but it went on for months.

There was a post-wedding celebration, a wedding celebration, and a pre-wedding celebration.

And this wasn't even his wedding.

It was his son's wedding.

I know.

But weirdly, the fact of the day, I think, for me is that at $600 million,

our billionaire Mukesh Ambani spent a smaller percentage of his own wealth than most Indians spend on their family weddings.

So, when you think about it that way, that's actually a bargain.

As Indian weddings go, it was a cheap wedding at $600 million.

He also built the world's most expensive private residence, a 27-story skyscraper home called Antillia, which is named after a mythical island in the Atlantic.

And it includes, get this, three helicopter pads, a ballroom, an ice cream parlor, a snow room that pumps out artificial snowflakes, and six stories of underground parking for all those supercars.

Yeah, the house itself costs between $1 and $2 billion.

So his home would make our list.

If you look at pictures of it on the internet, it looks like stacks and stacks of air conditioning units piled on top of each other.

It looks a bit like a super villain home.

Yeah, it really does.

So where did Mukesh Ambani get this kind of cash?

His fortune comes from something called Reliance Industries, a company founded by his father.

Now, we mostly mostly cover self-made fortunes on this podcast, but Mukesh's father, Deerabai, was a billionaire.

But it's a very interesting story.

Because he wasn't a billionaire all that time, so Mukesh, you know, wasn't born into the billionaire's lifestyle at first.

No, so his father began Reliance trading polyester, but Mukesh grew the company into a conglomerate that now includes everything from oil and gas, petrol chemicals, telecoms, media, and financial services.

Right.

And anything where there is a story of succession, you get intrigue, you get feuds.

It's a story of sibling rivalry.

So the bitter feud between Mukesh and his brother Anio has been described as a Shakespearean tragedy.

Yeah, we'll tell the story of their battle for control of reliance.

So is Mukesh good, bad, or just another billionaire?

We'll find out.

Right, let's go back to the beginning.

Mukesh was born in 1957, the eldest of four children.

There were two boys and two girls in a Gujarati Hindu family.

His parents moved from India to find work in Yemen, which is where he was born.

And we know that his dad will become a billionaire, but he wasn't anywhere near that when Mukesh was born.

Mukesh's father had been the third son of a village teacher.

He'd never finished high school.

He'd worked as a petrol pump attendant, later becoming an oil company clerk.

But he dreamt of starting his own business.

So when Mukesh was just one, he moved a family back to Mumbai and founded Reliance, which imported spices and yarn.

You know, we talk about in this podcast about people who are well-placed at important moments because polyester had just been invented for the textile industry.

It was the future of the business.

Not many people understood that, but Mukesh said, My dad did it.

Now, this was 1958, by the way.

If you're listening to, you know, the invention of polyester and wondering when on earth that was.

And getting into trading at that time was a really brave thing to do in India because most companies were run by a small clique of elite families.

And, you know, the family had no money.

So Mukesh's father had a novel way to raise money.

He'd noticed that the value of the silver, the actual metal in the local coins in Yemen, was worth more than their face value.

So he melted them down, sold the silver and pocketed the difference.

He said, I don't believe in not taking opportunities.

Blind me.

But Mukesh's family wasn't rich at this point.

In fact, until he was 12, they lived in a two-bedroom apartment in what's called a choll, a communal tenement building in a Mumbai slum.

Mukesh's brother Anil described it saying, We were seven members in the family, including my grandmother.

There was a common bathroom and toilet for a hundred families together in the chawl.

It's a long way away from that billion-dollar schedule.

It really is.

I can't imagine.

Picturing that and the wedding we've just been describing seems like lifetimes apart.

But there was a lot of hard work involved to get the family there.

So Mukesh remembers his dad was busy working all the time and never visited his school and helped with homework.

But he said, I guess when you're left on your own, you find your true potential.

And throughout Mukesh's teenage years, his dad's business was getting ever more successful.

It became one of the largest polyester trading companies in India.

It had expanded into making polyester fabric and clothes.

In 1975, Reliance launched a Vimal clothing brand, starting with polyester saris, then men's clothing.

And the label would later become iconic in India because it was known for its adverts featuring famous Bollywood actors.

Yeah, and in 1977, when banks refused to support their expansion with loans, Mukesh's dad listed Reliance Industries in an IPO.

That comes up a lot in our podcast, an initial public offering where you sell shares in the company to raise cash.

And going public at that time in 1977 was a relatively new thing in India.

So Mukesh's dad is actually credited with introducing the stock market to India's retail investors.

Thousands of small investors bought shares, causing a bit of a share market boom among what was an emerging middle class in India.

Reliance's annual shareholder meetings had to be held in a football stadium and actually paved the way for a kind of new share-owning class, which is an incredible financial resource for other Indian companies to draw upon.

So you're basically like supercharging the way people can invest in the stock market.

Well yeah you're basically making a resource of ordinary people's savings for economic ventures.

And that's something, for example, Margaret Thatcher tried to do in the 1980s when she privatized a bunch of industries.

The idea was it was not us and them, like the owners and the workers.

If everyone owns shares, then everyone feels like they're kind of owners.

It creates a new share-owning, wealth-owning class of people.

Right.

Everyone can be part of the economy.

Exactly.

It is now the most populous country in the world.

It's the world's biggest democracy, as we know.

So if you have a share-owning class of people, that is why a lot of people think that ultimately India will end up being the richest country in the world.

Well, it's certainly a journey that parallels Mukesh's family's wealth, because as their fortunes grow, the family moved out of the chao and into one of Mumbai's best neighborhoods.

Yeah, he was sent to an elite private school where he would hobnob with other future billionaires.

But, and this is really interesting, Mukesh's dad worried that his two sons, Mukesh and Ernil, would become too pampered.

I wonder what came from that impression.

So he kind of embarked on this weird, well, not weird, but unusual program of education.

He hired a tutor to give them a real life in inverted commas.

at school for three hours every day after actual school this person would take them on working class field trips which included taking public transport watching sports and a two-week trip to a rural village every year now mukesh says of that period he said it was one of the best things that happened to me.

We went out and learned how to play hockey.

We went by bus, we went by train, and we said, this is what life looks like.

And Mukesh's dad made his sons work for treats and luxuries.

So when the brothers wanted to buy expensive mangoes, he agreed only if they traveled on the lower deck of the Mumbai to Goa steamer.

Yeah, they said there was no reservation.

Everyone was puking.

These are his words.

He just wanted us to go through that event because he believed that there is no way we could ever buy that sort of experience.

It's really interesting when you think about what rich people consider real-life experiences like playing hockey, going by the bus.

Puking.

Puking.

Yes.

And Mukesh's education also includes some time at his dad's company.

He said, my father shared with me his passion for business and entrepreneurship from very early on.

Even when I was in high school, I used to spend long hours at the office on weekends.

Now, because his dad's business was in textiles, everyone expected Mukesh would study textile engineering at university.

But he shocked his family when he chose to study study chemical engineering instead.

Yeah, he said nobody had anticipated that chemicals was the direction in which Reliance was headed.

I did chemical engineering because it was supposed to be the future.

And throughout his studies, Mukesh worked for Reliance.

So he says he was basically working almost full-time for Reliance.

In his words, I finished college at 2:30 p.m.

and went straight to the office.

And he was given a lot of responsibility early on.

He said, I remember we were raided.

My father was in the US.

I was literally in charge handling the problem.

I must have been about 16 or 17.

So clearly, his his father trusted him quite a lot from a really young age.

Yeah.

And then in 1980, Mukesh moved to the USA to do something that is quite common amongst our billionaires.

He did an MBA, a Master's of Business Administration at Stanford University.

And that is, by the way, the heart of Silicon Valley.

So many of our billionaires have attended it.

Quite a significant number have dropped out.

Exactly.

Mukesh said, Our class and faculty were outstanding.

We had Nobel laureate Bill Sharp.

He was a professor of financial economics.

He made a great impact on me.

And he started by asking, how do you make a difference to the world?

But while Mikesh was enjoying Stanford, his dad was pushing ahead with a new plan for Reliance, a backwards integration approach.

He wanted to open a plant to manufacture polyester yarn rather than importing it from someone else.

If you're making widgets, you bring in the steel and you make it into a widget.

Vertical integration was saying you own the steel company too.

So rather than basically buying in the polyester fibers, he's building a factory to make the polyester fibers.

Basically, you own more of the manufacturing manufacturing process.

So you're essentially cutting out the middleman.

You're cutting out the middleman.

Views differ on whether that's a good idea.

Sometimes people say, just do what you're good at.

Don't do the other thing.

It's much better if people specialize in different things.

The idea of a conglomerate is you own more bits of the manufacturing supply chain.

So in 1980, Reliance got a hard-won license to manufacture polyester yarn.

ahead of other wealthy business families.

So they had an edge on the competition.

And there were rumors that this success of getting this license was linked to a lavish party hosted by Mukesh's dad to celebrate Indira Gandhi's 1980 election victory as prime minister.

So Mukesh was called back home by the family halfway through that two-year programme at Stanford.

Mukesh actually asked his dad to wait until he finished his studies, but then realised that his dad would essentially push ahead without him.

So he decided to leave Stanford to come back immediately, which makes him yet another billionaire dropout.

Yeah, another Stanford dropout along with Tiger Woods, Sam Altman, the guy behind OpenAI, and Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google.

That's this season alone.

So essentially what we've learned so far is if you go to university and you're thinking of becoming a billionaire, one of the things that might make you a billionaire is the attitude you'd have to dropping out.

Exactly.

If you finish your studies, you've got a much less chance of being successful, which is kind of the opposite of what everyone's told by their parents, right?

So this was the first project that Mukesh was given to run himself.

A real life example of this vertical integration, his father gives him 80 crores of rupees.

That's about $100 million.

dollars his father gave that to him and said go away and build me a polyester yarn manufacturing plant interestingly mukesh also said he gave me the full freedom the ability to bet the house and that is an interesting billionaire trait you have to be willing to lose everything and bet the house yeah but his father still had a sneaking suspicion that mukesh was a bit green so he gave him a boss his name is rasikbai meswani who'd been running the polyester business importing the polyester fiber and selling it onto textile mills so he's got kind of a minder, if you like.

So Mukesh was dedicated.

He slept in a trailer on site in the village where the plant was being built.

And actually, one business associate said at the time, I found him an extremely receptive listener who was learning all the time.

He virtually camped out there.

It is very unusual for any leader that I've dealt with.

Yeah, a close friend of the Anbani said, Mukesh is a guy who likes to get his hands dirty.

He's a shopkeeper in many ways.

He wants to sit at the till.

He wants to see what's going on.

And the polyester plant was actually built on schedule and went into production in a record record 18 months.

So clearly camping out in that trailer paid off.

Yeah, he's seeing the job through.

Now profits are rising, but the 1980s were actually a tricky time for Mukesh because Reliance faced a series of allegations around market manipulation from both the government and the media, although investigations never found anything to pursue.

Then in 1985, Mukesh's boss at the time, Rasik Bhai Miswani, died.

And in 1986, Mukesh's dad had a stroke, which took him months to recover from.

So if he's gone from three of us running the business, Mukesh says, for some time, I suddenly became alone.

He's in charge.

And Mukesh and significantly his brother Anno assumed day-to-day control of the company.

And by this point, it's essentially a giant, right?

Yeah, it's got assets worth nearly a billion dollars, although it had three million shareholders, remember?

So the wealth is spread around a little bit.

Now, it's difficult to find out how much money Mukesh had been earning over the years while working for his dad at Reliance.

But by 1988, Mukesh had joined Reliance's board of directors, and Reliance was known to pay high dividends and bonuses.

So it seems pretty safe to bet, saying that by

the time of his early 30s, Mukesh has made a million.

He's a millionaire by his early 30s.

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So, let's take a moment to discuss Mukesh the man beyond the business and beyond those initial millions.

Yeah, he's a practicing Hindu.

He doesn't drink, smoke, or gamble.

He is a vegetarian with a legendary appetite, but for Indian street food rather than fancy restaurants.

So, maybe that real-life education paid off.

And in his personal life, in 1985, age 28, he had an arranged marriage to nita dalal his dad had seen nita dance one day she was actually a trained dancer in classical indian dance and he actually tracked down her number for his son yeah she was also a school teacher and had one condition for the marriage that she could continue to teach Nita said, Sunflower Nursery paid me 800 rupees a month, which was around $65 at the time.

And all that salary was mine.

It paid for our dinners.

People used to laugh at me at that time, but it gave me a lot of satisfaction.

But like his father, Rita also wanted to show Mukesh Mukesh the real side of Mumbai.

They insisted they would take the bus rather than in his posh Mercedes.

And publicly, Mukesh kept a low profile because by the early 90s, his brother Anil had become the public face of Reliance, giving interviews and speaking to journalists.

Although, as we'll find out, this won't last.

This won't last, no.

And

just to give a bit of context here at the time, because we've talked before about moments where you're very well placed in a country's evolution.

We talked about Jack Ma when China was growing in power and the internet commerce was growing.

The Indian economy is changing at the time.

The early 90s saw the end of what people called something called the license raj, which is a decades-long system in which the government maintained control of industries through licenses.

The license is really hard to get.

Getting hold of one was really difficult.

So people often thought it was a hotbed of potential corruption.

And for Mukesh, this is actually a key moment for reliance because the company had been accused of unfairly benefiting from the system.

And now that it was no longer in place, he needed to show that the company could thrive without it.

And in order to grow, he was again looking at vertical backwards integration up the supply chain of polyester clothes, as his father had done in 1980.

So one notch back up the chain of polymers and polyester is actually petrochemicals and oil.

Yep.

You can't make polyester without it.

So First Reliance opened a petrochemical plant manufacturing a range of petrochemicals, polymers and polyesters.

And by 1995, Reliance Industries was India's India's largest private firm.

And in 1996, the Rubai and Bani and family are listed as billionaires by Forbes with $1.1 billion.

So Mukesh's dad is still officially head of the company.

Mukesh is running it with his brother.

So we're going to hold off declaring Mukesh himself a billionaire just yet.

But they are about to make a very, very big move into oil.

Yeah, India's oil industry had been nationalized in the 1970s, but there'd been declining production and development.

The government was ready for privatization of that industry by the mid-90s.

And Mukesh had big plans for this, right?

He planned to build a refinery twice the size of any other in India because he foresaw the growing demand for refined petroleum products in India and also globally.

Had consultants engaged, they said the project wasn't really viable, it wouldn't make money, it was too expensive.

But Mukesh micromanaged the construction four times a week for three years.

He flew the three and a half hours on a tiny propeller plane from Mumbai to the site in Jamnagar.

So Neeta often joined him and she actually ended ended up setting up a school in Jamnagar and Jamnagar was reportedly their son's third word after mummy and papu which means papi, papa.

Imagine that your third word comes out is the name of an oil refinery.

It opened in 1999.

It cost $3.4 billion

but that was 30% less than a similar refinery BP had built in Malaysia.

Now with the success of that oil refinery Mukesh had the idea to diversify further, this time beyond polyester.

Yeah in 1999 during his usual half-hour bedtime chat with his father, Mukesh brought up the idea of getting into the telecoms business, specifically broadband and mobile.

And this, as we know, looking back, market was about to explode.

Right, a very canny decision.

He seems to have a knack for just spotting these opportunities, just opening up, right?

And just inserting himself at just the right time.

Yeah, and having enough money to exploit those opportunities is really important.

Right, because all of us can sit around and say, oh, I think AI is going to be a big thing in the next few years.

What shall I do about it?

Yeah, well, if you don't have the money to invest, then I'm afraid you're left out in the cold.

Exactly.

So Mukesh's father said the price of long-distance mobile calls were too expensive to make it work.

But if you can make every Indian talk to every Indian at less than the cost of a postcard and still make money, you are in business.

So in 2000, they announced a plan to roll out broadband to 115 cities in India, investing $3 billion over two years.

And to raise those funds, they sold a slice, about 13%, of Reliance Petroleum to to overseas investors and that was thought to have basically raised about 750 million dollars and this was really the start of turning reliance into a conglomerate because in 2001 they also got into biotech and insurance yeah i think the two massive things that really propelled mukesh to the super wealthy status he is today are those moves into oil and to telecoms that's the meat in this sandwich i think it's so interesting because you kind of think you know as you pointed out some critics say why can't you just focus on one thing you do and do it really really well and make money from that?

But it seems like to supercharge your wealth, you need to get into a lot of industries that might not seem connected to the immediate listener.

It's actually not an unusual thing in some Asian countries.

In places like South Korea, you have these big conglomerates which have cross-holdings and lots of different industries.

In India, there's a group called Tata, owns Jaguar Land Rover, it owns consulting services, it owns steelworks.

It's not an unusual structure for an Asian, very rich family.

But as we've talked about, a family business also opens you up to family tragedies because something happened in July 2002 that would rock the family.

Mukesh's dad, Dirubhai Ambani, died at the age of 69 following a stroke.

The funeral procession took more than an hour to travel the two kilometers to the crematorium.

There were loads of crowds as crowds thronged in their thousands.

And he left behind a bearmuth.

At the time of his death, Reliance had an annual turnover of about $15 billion.

These are some crazy stats here.

It manufactured 3% of India's GDP, was responsible for 5% of the country's exports.

If you were to translate that into the US,

the US economy is 20 trillion, so 1% is 20 billion.

The numbers are stratospheric.

For one company to be that significant to a country the size of India is amazing.

For one company and for one family.

For one family.

And this is really interesting.

Dhurubhai died without leaving a will, which meant that

dad's personal property went to his wife, but the business wasn't as clear-cut.

Uh-oh, I see trouble on the horizon here, don't you?

In less than a month of their father's death, Mukesh becomes chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries.

His brother Anal becomes vice chairman.

The brothers jointly have inherited a fortune.

In 2003, Forbes, the business magazine jointly lists them as billionaires.

Yeah, they have a combined net worth of $2.8 billion.

That makes them the 123rd richest family in the world.

So even sharing that with his brother, Mukesh is a billionaire in 2003.

But as we've hinted, with more money comes more problems.

Yeah, at the time of his succession, Mukesh said there was no ambiguity from his father's legacy and insisted that he was the final authority on all matters concerning reliance.

I mean, talk about teeing up a conflict because Mukesh at the age of 47 and his brother, Anil, at the age of 45, are about to bitterly field for control of Reliance, cue the succession theme news.

Exactly.

I can hear the little tinkle of the piano right now.

Let's compare these two brothers.

What are their qualities?

What do we know about them?

So Mukesh was described as conservative, cerebral, reticent, and a workaholic.

Remember, he doesn't drink, smoke, or gamble.

Yeah, Anil, on the other hand, was described as flamboyant, braggadocio, loved being in the limelight, hanging out with Bollywood stars and politicians, two very different characters.

So as chairman, Mukesh set to work making changes to the company.

First, he swapped himself in as the company's public speaker, a job that Anil had been doing for years.

I bet he loved it.

I'm sure that's not going to go down well.

It was reported that Mukesh tried to oust Anil from the board of the company.

Now, rumours were swirling, but their feud only really became public in 2004 when Mukesh admitted in a TV interview there are issues which are ownership issues.

These are in the private domain, but as far as reliance are concerned, it is a very, very strong professional company.

So doing his best to reassure people.

To kind of say it's all fine.

But by 2005, it had clearly got so bad behind the scenes that their mother had to intervene.

She brokered a deal to split the conglomerate between the two brothers with the companies divided up in a demerger.

Quite a big move, that.

So Mikesh took on the industrial businesses.

So petrochemicals, oil and gas, refining, textiles, and Anno got the newer ones, telecoms, electric power, entertainment, and banking.

Now, if you had dealt those cards out to me, I would have said that Anil has got the better cards there.

Telecoms, entertainment, banking, those are, you know, I would say those are pretty good businesses to own.

Petrochemicals, oil and gas, highly cash generative and all that kind of stuff, but not exactly businesses of the future.

No, not exactly cutting edge.

And I'm sure it didn't really go down well in terms of PL for Mukesh either.

Yeah.

But anyway, they've got their own little empires.

And in 2006, Mukesh and Anil were listed separately on Forbes, which is the list we often look to to calibrate people's wealth.

Mukesh is 56th richest in the world with 8.5 billion.

Anil is 104th with 5.7 billion.

But the field was only just getting started, and Anil goes to war.

So it all starts with his company challenging a gas contract signed by Mukesh's company during the split.

Yeah, and then he accuses a government minister of being in league with his brother.

Anil's company buys newspaper ads in 33 national newspapers, making these allegations, taking it very public.

That's a lot of people looking at those claims.

Anno also files a $2 billion defamation suit against Mukesh for remarks he made during an interview with the New York Times.

Yes, because the New York Times had described Reliance's intelligence agency, a network of lobbyists, spies in New Delhi who say they collect data about the vulnerabilities of the powerful, about the minutiae of bureaucrats' schedules, and about the activities of their competitors.

So Mukesh had responded to the paper that all these activities were overseen by his brother before the split.

Yeah, they said we demerged all of that, so things weren't good between them.

Despite living in the same family block, they encountered each other at family events.

It's reported they did not talk to each other during this period.

And a friend of the family actually told the Telegraph newspaper in the UK, sometimes they are forced to shake hands, but they do not look at each other.

Talk about an awkward handshake.

Awkward handshake.

But this feud was not just hurtful for the family.

It could have been bad for the business because Makesh had just become the richest person in India.

He and Anil were fifth and sixth richest in the world.

And fearing that their feud could have an impact on the market, Indian's finance minister declared it a matter of national interest for the brothers to resolve their dispute privately.

It's a bit like getting an oasis back together.

Yeah, yeah, it really is.

Not just a matter of brotherly hurt and anger, but also a matter of national importance.

Incredible.

So they end up in the Supreme Court in 2009 over the gas dispute, and the court rules in Mukesh's favour.

So that's one point for Mukesh.

Yeah, once again, mum steps in.

She broke as a peace accord, if you allow agreement in 2010 and Anil withdrew his defamation suit.

Anno said, we've parted on a very cordial note and investors should have no fear whatsoever.

It's a new beginning for me and going forward, I'm sure Mukesh will do extremely well.

It's funny how the mum always seems to step in to kind of sort this out.

Didn't the same thing happen with the Oasis reunion?

I think the mum had a role to play there.

Anyway, so Anil saying, I'm sure Makesh will do extremely well.

which he went on to do, unlike Anil.

So it really was the beginning of the end for him because by 2019, Anno had gone from being the sixth richest person on the planet with 42 billion to falling off the billionaire list completely.

It's incredible.

We don't have time to go into exactly why he had such a stratospheric collapse in wealth, but his company, Anil's company, was $80 million in debt.

He'd become one of the fastest destroyers of shareholders of value in the last hundred years.

Not exactly.

It's not an award you want.

No, not something you want to be known for.

And Ano was actually facing jail time if he didn't pay off this debt.

So So Mukesh actually stepped in and paid it off for him.

Is he grateful or?

It sounds like a sort of real moment, that, doesn't it?

It could either be construed as an act of brotherly love or aggression.

Or aggression, yeah.

It's definitely passive-aggressive.

It's sort of like, I'll pay that bill for you.

Thanks a lot, bro.

In 2020, Anil declared personal bankruptcy in a UK court, although the judge said he clearly has more assets or income than he's letting on.

Mukesh, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength.

So he's getting on in the sectors that Anu was actually failing in.

Yeah, he launched something called Reliance Geo, a telecoms company in 2016.

And that actually partly contributed to the downfall of Anil Ambani's existing telecom business.

Right, because Mukesh's company slashed prices and invested in 4G technology, while Anno's company was struggling with old systems.

And now Geo has more than 470 million subscribers.

Very interesting tactic that you've got newer technology, so you've got an advantage there.

You come in, you cut prices really aggressively to have a kind of land grab, get market share.

Then, once you've got the market share, you can start dialing up the price just a little bit.

But you go in, so obviously killed off the competition.

It's not unlike what companies like Uber do, right?

You kind of slash prices, make it cheaper than ever to use the company.

And then when you have market dominance, you just start dialing up the price.

And a lot of people would say that other people like advertising rates on Google, for example, or Amazon, for example, you see that same sort of thing.

You make something that people can't live without, and then you start to sort of slowly ratchet the price up.

So this year, in 2024, Mukesh's Reliance actually joined forces with Disney to create a streaming service in India with the idea to dominate Netflix and Prime Video.

So, again, they're trying to have that land grab over streaming.

Yeah, he's now the richest person in Asia.

He's got a staggering $115 billion.

And he also has plans to enter e-commerce with the aim of challenging global giants like Amazon and Walmart.

So, Mukesh is clearly not one to rest on his laurels.

Given the economic expansion of India and given their incredibly dominant role role in many of these industries, I'm going to stick my neck out and say that in five years time, Mukesh Ambani is going to be the richest person in the world.

Oh, that's an interesting prediction.

Let's come back in five years and see if you're right.

Okay.

There's so many new billionaires being formed all the time.

We'll probably still be going with a bit of luck.

Hopefully, fingers crossed.

So one former employee said of Mukesh, he wants to be Netflix.

He wants to be Alibaba.

He wants to be everything.

And that's the thing about billionaires.

They just have an insatiable appetite for more.

As we've often said, you got to 5-10 million, I'm out of here.

Yeah, but if you want to get to 5-10 billion, well, you have to be more like Mukesh Mbani.

Exactly.

So we've got to judge him.

We've got to go through our categories and score him out of 10 to find out whether he's good, bad, or just another billionaire.

And we always start with just the numbers, the wealth.

So in 2024, the Mbani family was valued as equivalent to 10% of India's GDP.

According to one Barclays report, Mukesh personally would be about 3% of the GDP of India.

Nuts.

So to be 3% of GDP, that is 3% of everything you spend, make, do in a country, all the economic activity in a whole country.

3%.

Now, if this was the US, that's about 20 trillion in their GDP.

So 1% is 200 billion.

So 3% would be 600 billion.

So to be that rich compared to your country, someone in the US would have to have 600 billion, which is more than double what anyone's got at the moment.

I mean it's a lot of economic activity to be responsible for.

No wonder the finance minister said it was of national importance for Mukesh to sort out his spat with his brother.

I mean we have rules in the UK that a government can't borrow more than 3% of GDP to make the books balance.

That's the deficit for an entire year.

Anyway, despite all that cash, he claimed in 2023, Mukesh said money didn't drive him.

So he says that his dad said, if you start anything just to make money, you are a fool because you will never make any money or be a billionaire.

If you start with purpose, and if your purpose is you want to be the best in the world, you want to do what nobody else has done, then money is a byproduct and that byproduct should never be important.

I still follow his advice.

Yeah.

And in this category on wealth, it's not just how much they have, but how they spend it.

And just going back to that $600 million wedding.

Well, as you said, the $600 million was proportionally lower than what the average wealthy Indian family would spend on their wedding.

He spent 0.5% of his net worth on the wedding.

Parents in India spend on average between 5 and 15% of their worth on their child's wedding.

So by his standards, it was a cheap one.

I mean, having said that, what a cheap skate.

I still feel like building a personal skyscraper with an ice cream parlour, artificial snow, a staff of hundreds, that still ratchets him up in the billionaire's.

I can't think of more flamboyant spending than that in our whole series.

Having the most expensive home in the world, which has got helicopter pads, six floors of parking, 600 staff.

I mean, he knows how to spend it, let's face it.

I mean, he scores really highly for me.

I think I would give him maybe even a nine out of four.

I was heading towards nine.

I mean, I can't give him 10 because he's not the richest person we've had on, but I'm getting a solid nine.

And like I say, I predict he's going to be the richest in the world.

So there'll be a lot more fancy skyscrapers being built for the Mbanis.

Okay, so he scores a nine on wealth.

Rags to riches.

This is how far they've come.

We've seen some people start literally from literally rags, like Oprah Winfrey, for example.

But this doesn't qualify, I don't think.

Well, it's a a funny one because I think if you started the kind of family line from his father and the family were literally living in tenement housing, in slum housing,

then, you know, maybe the journey would be further.

But having said that, by the time Mukesh was going to school, he was clearly being sent to elite schools, so elite that his dad worried that he was going to be out of touch.

So he got a tutor in to teach him real-life education.

Yeah, so I think maybe...

You're right, because if we were just doing the family,

it would be a 10.

But he, by the time he's going to school, his father's already rich.

He grows up with an empire which is growing alongside him.

So I'm going to give him a three on this one.

Even, even lower, two, maybe.

Yeah, I think I agree with you.

I think, well, maybe even a one out of ten for me, because clearly he got

zero.

No, I think maybe just a one out of ten.

I still think we've yet to see a true zero out of ten in Rags to Riches.

Okay.

Because he was given access to the family company, but he did, you know, work hard for it.

Okay.

I think you've convinced me to give it a one as well.

That's a one from both of us villainy um this is what are you prepared to do to get ahead so this is interesting right so a close friend uh spoke to the new york times for that profile and mukash that got him into all that trouble with his brother and he said remember these guys all grew up in the licensed raj they grew up as lotuses from the filth very interesting image yeah it makes them tough it makes them suspicious it makes them vindictive at times and makes them come out in a hurry they always see life as oh god better not miss an opportunity when they were growing up you didn't get a second chance.

Yeah.

And also, you know, you don't have to read many books about India's past to realize that corruption has been an ever-present specter in Indian business.

And if you're going to go to the very, very top, a lot of people say it's unlikely you haven't had to scratch backs, pull strings.

In May 2024, Indian Congress challenged the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order a thorough investigation against Mukesh Ambani and Gautama Dhani, different family, also a billionaire, after he described them as hoarders of black money.

Now, what that means is loads of cash which have been taken out of the system, which are stored and hoarded to hide them from the tax authorities.

In 2016, I happened to be in India,

literally sitting at a bar one time, and they said, hold everything.

Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, is going to make an announcement live on television.

So everyone gathered round and he announced he was abolishing, banning all 501,000 rupee notes.

They would all be cancelled.

People could go in over the next couple of days to bring them in, to exchange them for new notes.

It was a direct attack on what they thought was a sort of shadow economy of hoarded money.

It was chaos for days.

There must have been people with suitcases trying to bring them to the bank to change.

Well, that's the whole thing.

There was accusations that people had warehouses full of cash and it was not making its way into the real economy and it wasn't very productive.

I couldn't get to the airport the next day because I had no notes to pay the cab driver with.

So it's also worth noting, however, that Modi attended the Mbani Mbani wedding just months after making the statement.

Who didn't?

Were you there?

I mean, sadly, my invite got lost in the post.

Mikesh has always said he's never paid a bribe or broken a rule.

He told the New York Times that these are all fables, but he has conceded there are indirect ways of gaining favour.

While Reliance never pays the tuitions of bureaucrats' children, he acknowledged that foundations controlled by or affiliated with Reliance sometimes have, in his words, given some scholarship, maybe, but that's all out in the public domain.

And in 2014, it was revealed that Reliance paid politicians $100,000 a year for quote consultancy retainers.

And in 2024 both Modi and his election rival Rahu Gandhi accused the other of accepting quote truckloads of cash from Mbani.

Yeah, so okay you can make your own judgments on that.

All I would say is that in the UK Parliament there are plenty of politicians and MPs who also get paid retainer for consultancy services.

So that's not unique to India.

And we also have to note that when it comes to inequality, when the lavish wedding spending came out in the press, press, it was criticized really widely as a symbol of the widening gap between the rich and the poor in India.

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point because there is real poverty, desperate poverty in India.

I think actually India's income inequality is now worse than it was under British rule.

Wow.

The very existence of billionaires we've discussed in the past is sort of a symbol of crushing inequality and people find it obscene.

So when it comes to villainy, how would you rate him?

Gosh.

I'm going to go straight down the middle and do a five.

Well, I kind of feel like, and I think you can sense this in his story in the rivalry with his brother.

He is a really tough operator.

And I think, you know, that willingness to get into telecoms in a way to crush

his own brother, to crush his own brother, even though you know that the company's been divided specifically to give the brother the telecom side of it.

That to me kind of indicates there's a certain slipperiness.

Yeah.

Because, you know, these were two brothers who were ostensibly growing up to inherit the family business together.

So, I would give him slightly higher.

I would give him a six out of ten.

Okay, fine.

Six from you, five from me.

Philanthropy, they've got a lot of money.

How much do they give away?

So, in 2023, it was reported that Mukesh Mbani and family donated around $50 million to the Reliance Foundation, which focuses on education and healthcare.

Sounds like a lot, but when you put it into perspective, it actually isn't.

That is peanuts compared to his wealth.

He's given away 0.06%

of his worth.

That was in 2023.

He's no Bill Gates.

He's no Chuck Feeney.

Yeah, exactly.

So he's only really ranked third out of Indian philanthropists, despite him being the richest man, not just in India, but in Asia.

It's a two from me.

I mean, I would go as far as to say even just a one, really.

Okay.

One, yeah.

Yeah.

Could do better, Mukesh.

Could do a lot better.

And then power.

This is a company which generates 3% of Indian GDP.

That is nuts.

So he's got to be powerful.

So a 2024 CNN report of India's growth as a superpower placed him as one of the three men alongside Modi and fellow billionaire Dhani as, quote, playing a fundamental role in shaping the economic superpower India will become in the coming decades.

Yeah, so he can pick up the phone anytime he likes and talk to Narendra Modi or probably any other head of state in the world, I would say.

So I'm going to give him for power.

He's also helping shape what modern India looks like.

So I'm going to give him a nine.

Oh, interesting.

I feel like I would give him an eight out of ten just because, you know, he's really well known in business circles.

He's incredibly famous in India.

But I would say that a lot of people, up until the Mbani wedding story, started coming out and flooding people's news feeds, a lot of people didn't know who he was.

Yeah, I guess that's true.

I still think he's a mover and a shaker.

And whether people in the street know him in the UK or the US or whatever, I'm willing to bet that if you stop someone on the street in the United States, they wouldn't know who he is.

Doesn't mean he hasn't got enormous power.

So nine from you, eight eight from me.

Got it.

What about his legacy?

I think it's kind of too early to tell.

It's going to be one of those ones where I think he's going to be the richest person in the world in a few years' time.

So I would say he's going to cast a huge influence over India.

And he's like a poster child of Indian economic emergence.

And not just in one industry, in multiple industries, right?

So they're changing the face of things like telecoms, textiles, petrochemicals in one country and also the world.

Yeah, I'd say legacy, a work in progress, but I'd give it an eight right now.

A solid eight.

Yeah.

But room to grow.

Always room to grow.

Always room to grow.

So then we have this awful decision we have to make all the time.

Is there good, bad, or just another billionaire?

And I was getting nervous because these people are so powerful.

I think they're there listening.

I'll be on some blacklist for the rest of my life.

And you also may not get to interview them.

Exactly.

I'm ruining my own journalistic chances of getting in the door.

And also the chances of getting invited to a wedding, an Umbani wedding.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, I'm going to ask you to go first well i mean as you've pointed out it's still very much a developing story and he clearly has the kind of guts and motivation to go even further he hasn't done anything quite as dastardly as other billionaires we've judged like for instance he's not a drug trafficker for instance or an arms dealer exactly so i would say for now my judgment is just another billionaire.

Phew, I agree 100%.

Because I think we don't know enough to call it the other way.

So either other way.

So I will say he's just another billionaire.

But when I say that, like I say, keep an eye on this guy because I think he's going to be the richest person in the world.

It'll be between him and Elon Musk.

And that all depends on what happens in the space race and what have you.

But he's got a very good chance.

So do you think there will be Mbani rockets in the future?

Could be.

I mean, when you get to a certain amount of wealth, how are you going to soak up that kind of money?

Just firing rockets into space is one of the most expensive things you can do.

So keep an eye on the skies for Mukesh Mbani.

Makesh Mbani, you are just another billionaire.

But gosh, you've got a lot of money.

So who's next up?

So we have the man who came to symbolise Russian excess and money in the UK.

A man who became the poster child for oligarchs in London, particularly in the 90s and noughties.

It is one-time Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich.

Good, Bad Billionaire was produced by Hannah Hufford and Louise Morris, with additional production support from Tams and Curry.

James Cook is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins, and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minel.

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