Third richest person in the world: Indian industrialist rises in billionaire Olympus

With Gautam Adani, an Asian has made it into the top 3 in the super-rich club for the first time.

Third richest person in the world: Indian industrialist rises in billionaire Olympus

With Gautam Adani, an Asian has made it into the top 3 in the super-rich club for the first time. With a net worth of $137 billion, the 60-year-old business tycoon is right behind Americans Musk and Bezos.

Indian industrialist Gautam Adani has become the third richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. According to the rich list, the 60-year-old's fortune has doubled to over $137 billion in the past year (currently over €137 billion). Adani has overtaken both Bill Gates and Frenchman Bernard Arnault. In the ranking he is right behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos from the USA.

It's the first time ever that an Asian has made the top three in the super-rich club. India's Mukesh Ambani and China's Jack Ma have never made it this far.

Adani is a "self-made billionaire". The son of a middle-class family from Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat, he left school prematurely and initially earned his living in commodity trading. In 1988 he started his own export business. Adani laid the foundation for his vast wealth in the 1990s when he secured the port of Mundra on the coast of Gujarat, now India's largest port.

Today, Adani owns the country's third-largest corporate group, with businesses ranging from coal mining and cooking oil production to airports and news broadcasters. Adani Enterprises is one of the largest conglomerates in the world. Adani himself holds 75 percent of the shares in his conglomerate. He is currently also offering licenses for 5G.

On the one hand, he owes his jump to the top of the rich list to the explosion in the price of his shares, which have shot up by 2400 percent since March 2020. Another reason Adani has overtaken the world's most prominent US billionaires is that they have recently been donating more and more money. Gates announced in July that he would contribute $20 billion to the Bill