Gautam Adani

Gautam Adani is the founder and chairman of Adani Group, a multinational conglomerate that owns seven subsidiary companies. In January 2023, Adani Group was accused of stock manipulation and accounting fraud. As of April 2023, Adani's net worth is $46.6 billion.

Adani dropped out of high school at sixteen and later attended Gujarat University, but he dropped out during his second year. At eighteen, he left his hometown of Ahmedabad to go to Mumbai.

After arriving in Mumbai, Adani worked in the diamond-sorting trade. He later started his own diamond-sorting business and became a millionaire at age twenty. In the 1980s, Adani's brother purchased a plastics factory in Ahmedabad, and the two began working together. Adani traveled back to Ahmedabad. Back in his hometown, he began importing raw materials for manufacturing, developing international contacts, and working as a global trader of commodities.

In 1988, Adani founded his own polymers import-export business called Adani Exports Ltd. The company expanded quickly after a series of economic liberalization measures were introduced in India around the same time. Soon they began selling other commodities, such as metals, agricultural items, and power. In 1995, Adani Exports broke into the port sector and grew even more. Adani Exports changed its name to Adani Enterprises in 2006. Adani Group aims to be the world's largest renewable energy producer by 2030.

In January 2023, short-seller Hindenburg Research accused the Adani Group of “pulling the largest con in corporate history” after concluding a two-year investigation, which alleged that the company engaged in “a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.” After evaluating its discoveries, Hindenburg Research concluded that Adani Group was highly overvalued, heavily in debt with ratios below 1.0, and had engaged in offshore money laundering. As a result, Hindenburg shorted its Adani stock. By the end of the month, Adani Group's seven subsidiaries lost a collective $65 billion in market capitalization. The following day, Adani's personal worth dropped by $34 billion, which removed him from Bloomberg's list of the ten wealthiest people on the planet.