Mukesh Ambani: Asia’s richest person

**Simon Jack** (0:08)
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:15)
And then we judge them. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

**Simon Jack** (0:18)
I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:20)
And I'm Zing Tsjeng, I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

**Simon Jack** (0:23)
And this week's billionaire is the richest person in India. Mukesh Ambani worth a staggering $115 billion.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:35)
He is the person who funded a truly lavish wedding, which you may have seen pictures of recently.

**Simon Jack** (0:40)
Yeah, Rihanna was the wedding act.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:43)
Kim Kardashian, Boris Johnson, Tony Blair, Mark Zuckerberg, they were all there.

**Simon Jack** (0:47)
It cost a cool $600 million. That is quite a wedding bash.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:52)
And $20 million of that was spent on flowers.

**Simon Jack** (0:55)
You're kidding. How can you spend $20 million on flowers?

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:58)
It's a lot of flowers.

**Simon Jack** (0:59)
A 5,000-person main wedding, but it went on for months.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:03)
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.

**Simon Jack** (1:10)
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.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:26)
So when you think about it that way, that's actually a bargain.

**Simon Jack** (1:29)
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 Antilia, which is named after a mythical island in the Atlantic.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:43)
And it includes, get this, three helicopter pads, a boar room, an ice cream parlour, a snow room that pumps out artificial snowflakes and six stories of underground parking for all those supercars.

**Simon Jack** (1:55)
Yeah, the house itself cost between $1 and $2 billion, so his home would make our list.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:02)
If you look at pictures of it on the internet, it looks like stacks and stacks of air-conditioning units powered on top of each other. It looks a bit like a super villain home.

**Simon Jack** (2:11)
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.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:20)
Now, we mostly cover self-made fortunes on this podcast, but Mukesh's father, Dhirubhai, was a billionaire. But it's a very interesting story.

**Simon Jack** (2:29)
Because he wasn't a billionaire all that time. So Mukesh, you know, wasn't born into the billionaire's lifestyle at first.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:36)
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.

**Simon Jack** (2:48)
Right, and anything where there is a story of succession, you get intrigue, you get feuds.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:53)
It's a story of sibling rivalry. So the bitter feud between Mukesh and his brother Anil has been described as a Shakespearean tragedy.

**Simon Jack** (3:01)
Yeah, we'll tell the story of their battle for control of reliance.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:04)
So is Mukesh good, bad or just another billionaire? We'll find out.

**Simon Jack** (3:11)
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.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:21)
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.

**Simon Jack** (3:30)
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.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:39)
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 yam.

**Simon Jack** (3:48)
And 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.

**Zing Tsjeng** (4:02)
Now, this was 1958, by the way, if you're listening to 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 the family had no money.