As oil-to-telecom conglomerate Reliance Industries’ stock continued to rally on Monday, chairman Mukesh Ambani is gearing up to enter the $100-billion club.
At the time of filing this report, the RIL stock had crossed the record Rs 2,400 mark after it recorded a 52-week high of Rs 2,394.30 on the BSE on Friday.
Friday also saw the company’s market cap race past record Rs 15-lakh crore on the back of a rally that came following several acquisitions, including JustDial and Strand Life Sciences. The company is also actively working on its entry into the renewable energy space with new acquisitions.
The Friday rally also bumped up the company’s chairman and India’s richest man Ambani’s net worth by $3.7 billion in a single day. Ambani, who is also Asia’s wealthiest man, is inching closer to the $100-billion club with his net worth standing at $92.6 billion now, as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
As of today, Ambani is the 12th richest man globally, behind L'Oreal heiress and the richest woman in the world Francoise Bettencourt Meyers whose net worth stands at $92.9 billion. The two are racing towards the coveted club that features only 10 names currently: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, LVHM’s Bernard Arnault, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett.
The only other Indian in the top 20 of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index is Adani Group’s Gautam Adani who stands two positions lower than Ambani at 14 with a net worth of $71.8 billion.
Ambani’s net worth has seen a steady increase over the last few months. According to the Hurun Research Institute report of 2021, the 64-year-old tycoon saw a 24% YoY change in his wealth in the pandemic-struck year.
As per the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2020, Ambani had made Rs 90 crore per hour since the lockdown in March 2020 and his wealth had increased from Rs 2,77,700 crore to Rs 6,58,400 crore at the time the report was released (September 2020). The report also said that at the beginning of the pandemic, his wealth had dropped but “backed by a series of fund raising and strategic investment from Facebook, Google and so on into Jio and Reliance Retail, his valuation registered a ‘V-shaped recovery’ and increased by 85% in 4 months”.
