Mukesh Ambani is an Indian business mogul who serves as chairman and managing director of the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a multinational conglomerate with businesses across sectors such as petrochemicals, energy, textiles, retail, and telecommunications. With a net worth of $117.5 billion as of March 4, 2024, Ambani is Asia’s wealthiest person. He ranked among the top 10 wealthiest people in the world on Forbes magazine’s annual list of billionaires in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Ambani is one of four children of renowned Indian industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani, who first worked as a gas station attendant in Aden, Yemen. Because of the increasingly unstable political climate in Aden, where Mukesh Ambani was born, the family relocated in 1958 to the Bhuleshwar neighborhood of Bombay (now Mumbai), where they lived in a chawl (a communal building that commonly features low-rent two-room apartments). That same year Dhirubhai Ambani and a cousin founded the Reliance Commercial Corporation, which grew into RIL from a commodities-trading business that they initially operated out of a one-room rental space.

Chandigarh. Statuettes at the Rock Garden of Chandigarh a sculpture park in Chandigarh, India, also known as Nek Chand's Rock Garden. Created by Nek Chand Saini an Indian self taught artist. visionary artist, folk artist, environmental art

Mukesh Ambani has been credited with commissioning the globe’s largest start-up petroleum refinery at Jamnagar, Gujarat state, in 1999, as well as spearheading the creation of several state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities that vastly increased RIL’s production capabilities. Another refinery was added close to the first Jamnagar refinery in 2008. Two years earlier Ambani led the development of Reliance Retail—a retail network comprising both physical and online stores, claimed by Reliance to be India’s largest retailer. Reliance Retail’s customer base reached 249 million in the 2023 fiscal year.

Ambani’s multiple business successes include the purchase of the Mumbai Indians, an Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team, through a Reliance subsidiary in 2008. The Mumbai Indians were the only IPL team to grow in brand value in 2020 despite empty stadiums in a pandemic-hit world. It retained its position as the most valuable IPL brand in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

In 2010 the two Reliance groups owned by Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani mutually scrapped the noncompetition agreement signed in 2006, and later that decade Mukesh Ambani established Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of RIL dedicated to telecommunications and e-commerce. The Jio brand offered India’s first nationwide network for 4G broadband service in 2016. By August 2023, Jio’s customer base had crossed 450 million, and its 5G customers numbered more than 50 million. About this time, Ambani declared that Jio will be among the first companies globally to develop 6G capabilities.

February 2024 saw Ambani’s RIL enter into an agreement with Indian media company Viacom18 and American entertainment giant Disney to create a joint venture, valued at $8.5 billion, forming one of India’s leading media companies. This joint venture aims to provide entertainment and sports coverage to more than 750 million viewers and will have exclusive rights to distribute Disney productions in India. Nita Ambani, Mukesh Ambani’s wife, is set to become the chair of the joint venture.

Mukesh Ambani is married to Nita Ambani, an educationist, a businessperson, and a champion of women’s and children’s rights. She is a member of the International Olympic Committee; founder and chair of Reliance Foundation, RIL’s philanthropic arm; and manager of the high-value IPL team the Mumbai Indians. The billionaire couple lives in Antilia, their luxury home along South Mumbai’s Altamount Road, one of the most expensive addresses in the world. In fact, Antilia is one of the most expensive homes in the world. This ostentatious 400,000-square-foot (37,000-square-meter) residence has 27 floors, a temple, a salon, a private movie theater, a garage that can accommodate 168 cars, a car service station, and a snow room to help the family stay cool in the humid Mumbai summers.