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After an almost year-long hiatus on January 5, 2024, billionaire Gautam Adani reclaimed his first position among the list of richest Indians. This was two days after a Supreme Court bench granted a reprieve of sorts by allowing SEBI to continue the investigations into allegations, including stock price manipulation, flouting regulations of minimum shareholding and roundtripping.
The market seems to have misread the judgement as a clean chit for Adani and hence the stock prices of the group companies rallied initially. This helped improve Adani’s net worth. However, as realisation dawned that the investigations against the group were continuing, stocks reacted downward again, proving the increase in wealth to be ephemeral.
Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani overtook him to become the richest Indian on January 6 and has continued to hold onto his position.
While Adani was the 12th richest person in the world on January 5, 2024, he has been in the 14th position since January 6. Ambani now holds the 12th position.
Data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows that even on the day when Adani reclaimed his position as the richest Indian, his wealth was still 16.5 per cent lower than what he owned last year. On January 5, 2023, Adani was the third richest person in the world with a wealth of $117 billion. On January 21, three days before Hindenburg published its report, he owned assets worth $121 billion. On January 24, the day the report was published, Adani slipped to the fourth position with a wealth of $119 billion. By March 5, it dropped to $49.8 billion.
In the next few months, until November 5, his wealth remained almost stable, ranging between $60 billion and $64 billion. However, it started recovering since then with a 17 per cent increase in the November-December period and a 39 per cent growth in the December-January period.
Adani’s wealth is, of course, tied to the prices at which the stocks in his group trade. The share price of Adani Green Energy was up 72 per cent on January 5, compared to its low point on February 2023. Adani Ports and Adani Power were trading at an all-time high of ₹1152.85 and ₹550.10, respectively, on January 5. The price of Adani Enterprises stock too was up 60 per cent from the February 2023 low. They had fallen around the time of the Hindenburg report’s publication.
Ambani’s gain
Adani’s fall resulted in Mukesh Ambani rising as the richest Indian for 11 months. Even though he got pushed to the second position on January 5 the difference between the wealth of Ambani and Adani was just $0.6 billion on that day. As of January 8, Ambani owned wealth worth $97.5 billion, while Adani’s wealth was $94.5 billion.
Between January 5, 2023 and January 5, 2024, according to Bloomberg, Ambani’s wealth grew by 12 per cent. While last year, Ambani was also a member of the top 10 richest people in the world list, he was pushed to the 12th position in February 2023. He hasn’t manage to be a part of the top 10 club since then. This was mainly due to the rise in the wealth of a few other billionaires, including Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Page and Carlos Slim.
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