Mukesh Ambani

Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani is an Indian billionaire and businessman known for his role as founder, chairman, and managing director of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), a Fortune Global 500 company and India's most valuable company by market value. Ambani is worth an estimated $90 billion, making him one of the richest Asian men.

Ambani was born on April 19, 1957, in Aden, Yemen. He was one of four children of Kokilaben and Dhirubhai Ambani, who first worked as a gas station attendant. The Ambani family relocated in 1958 to the Bhuleshwar neighborhood of Bombay, present-day Mumbai. The family lived in a chawl, a communal building that features low-rent, two-room apartments. The same year, Dhirubhai and a cousin founded the Reliance Commercial Corporation (RIL), which grew from a commodities-trading business operated out of a one-room rental space.

Ambani earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Bombay, now the University of Mumbai. Later, he pursued his MBA from Stanford University but dropped out in 1981 to join his family's business.

Following his father's death, Ambani and his brother Anil assumed joint leadership of the Reliance companies. Later, the brothers' feuds over control prompted their mother, Kokilaben Ambani, to split Reliance's assets in a non-competition agreement. Under this agreement, Ambani assumed control of the gas, oil, and petrochemicals units as RIL under the umbrella of the Reliance Group.