Ready?
Ready for the challenge
In India it’s hard to go a day without consuming a product of Mukesh Ambani’s.
Petrol, phones, TV, newspapers, supermarkets,
his company, Reliance Industries, is everywhere.
Last year Reliance became India’s largest and most profitable company.
And this has made Mukesh Ambani India’s richest man,
with unparalleled power and influence.
But to build his empire he's had to face-off with none other than his younger brother,
in a feud which captivated the Indian press for over a decade.
This is how Mukesh Ambani grew his incredible wealth while his brother’s withered
and India watched on.
Mukesh Ambani is estimated to be worth 60 billion dollars
and he’s not afraid of conspicuous consumption.
This is where his family lives.
Possibly the world’s most expensive private home, costing two billion dollars.
This 27 story tower has more in common with a hotel.
It has 600 permanent staff.
And that makes sense when you find out it has three helipads,
a 168-car garage, a ballroom, spa and temple.
But despite his outrageous spending, Mukesh is revered by many Indians.
He's perceived as like a visionary because
he's running almost all businesses very successfully.
He's not just extraordinarily ambitious but very calculative.
I am proud to inform you that it was yet another year of robust and record performance.
The story of the Ambani family’s rise is well known across India.
It's a very famous story where Dhirubhai - Ambanis' father -
has come with just 500 rupees to India to work as an assistant in a petrol pump
and then from there he built his empire.
And he got into, he started accessing stock market
and he created the largest private enterprise of the country.
When their father died in 2002 from a stroke, the family was thrown into disarray
and the two eldest brothers found themselves competing for influence.
After Mukesh used his position as chairman of the Reliance board
to assert his authority over Anil, the relationship became heated.
Right after the death of one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs,
Dhirubhai Ambani, his two sons locked horns, that too in the public eye.
Their mother had to step in
and designed a plan to split the company between the brothers.
Reliance was cut in two.
Mukesh got the legacy industries of oil, gas and petrochemicals.
Anil - telecommunications and financial products.
But this business divorce did not put an end to their disputes.
In 2009 Anil took his brother's gas company to court demanding
they sell energy to his company at a heavily reduced rate
because that was their agreement.
Mukesh argued that when the company got broken up that agreement was void.
The argument went all the way to the highest court
and even pulled in the top level of India's government.
The split has gone from boardroom to courtroom,
courtroom to various rooms of ministers
and both brothers have started making allegations against each other
for influencing certain decisions or stalling certain decisions of the rival,
so they've become arch rivals and they were not in talking terms and
the India Inc, India Incorporated had witnessed very, very nasty fight for the empire.
The highest court ruled in favour of Mukesh and the two agreed to drop a noncompete agreement
which stopped them from entering the same markets.
Mukesh stormed into the telecom and media sector,
buying up Indian news and entertainment stations as well as creating Jio,
a phone company which has driven India’s data tariffs to the lowest in the world.
After the noncompete clause is over the elder brother Mukesh Ambani had
entered to the same telecom business and to become the largest one.
And he had actually made other telecom companies either go bankrupt or merge
or quit from the market.
While Mukesh was aggressively expanding, his brother was losing money and market share.
In 2018 Anil owed more than 80 million dollars to Swedish telco Ericsson,
he didn’t pay and they took him to court.
A judge ruled Anil needed to pay up but he didn’t have the money.
Finally a court decided that if his company didn’t pay, Anil was headed to jail.
The Supreme Court has found, has held Anil Ambani in contempt of court.
With the Indian media looking on,
Mukesh swept in at the 11th hour and bailed out his brother.
Anil agreed to sell telecommunication assets to his brother’s company
highlighting their different fortunes.
Anil Ambani, who was the sixth richest man in the world in 2008,
is now ranked as 1349th by Forbes.
He failed miserably, the younger brother had failed miserably and they were,
the enmity which emerged during the split is still continuous.
The sources are telling us that they are not still in talking terms.
So there is some kind of hostility, it's prevailing.
Meanwhile Mukesh Ambani now stands toe-to-toe with the likes of Jack Ma,
challenging for the title of Asia’s richest man.