“Jeff Bezos has lost his position as the second richest person in the world to Indian billionaire Gautam Adani. The two push each other as Amazon shares fall.” With this surprise dawned on Friday the Bloomberg Billionaires Index: Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, the richest Asian in the world, surpassed Jeff Bezos as the second richest person on the planet.
His fortune amounts to $152.2 billion (the same amount in euros due to currency parity), while that of the CEO of Amazon ‘collapsed’ to 146.9 billion. Although both are now vying for the position of second richest man in the world, their fortunes remain very far from the first place, occupied by Elon Musk and its 273,200 million.
Who is Gautam Adani?
The rise of the Indian has been meteoric: He started the year ranked No. 14 for Bloomberg billionaires, and nine months later he has overtaken Bezos.. But who is this Indian tycoon? Adani is the chairman of the Adani group, a multinational conglomerate whose companies are engaged coal mining, data centers, airport management and renewable energies, among other occupations.
Known as ‘the king of coal’, Adani decided to drop out of college to work in a plastics import business in the 1980s, to later expand its activities to port operations and global trade. Thus, his conglomerate began to diversify, and today it is the leading private sector port and airport operator in all of India. It also distributes gas networks in the city and extracts coal, the latter the activity that propelled him to wealth.
Why has his fortune grown so much and so fast? The increase in energy prices, caused by the crisis and the war in Ukrainecoincides with Adani’s promise last year to invest 70 billion dollars in renewable energy. His statements were seen as an “image wash”, since Adani’s fortune has been consolidated thanks to the exploitation of fossil fuels.
In any case, Adani’s announcement and the increase in energy demand have caused an increase in investors in Indian companies. In February it became richest person in asiaand has already surpassed the fortunes of blue-chip billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Shares in Adani Power, its power generation company, they have nearly quadrupled since 2022 began.
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The surprising second richest man in the world: Gautam Adani