Gautam Adani

Gautam Shantilal Adani did not finish college, did not inherit a business and did not start with capital. He built one of India’s largest conglomerates on the parts of the economy most people find boring — ports, power lines, coal, cement — and in the process became the most argued-about businessman in the country.

Ahmedabad, 1962

He was born on 24 June 1962 in Ahmedabad, one of eight children of Shantilal and Shantaben Adani. The family was Jain and had come to the city from Tharad, in the north of Gujarat. His father ran a small textile trading business.

It was a household of modest means in a crowded part of the old city. Nothing about it pointed at ports or power stations. What it did give him was a very Gujarati idea of what business is: buy, sell, keep the margin, trust relationships over paperwork.

He went to Sheth Chimanlal Nagindas Vidyalaya and enrolled for a commerce degree at Gujarat University. He left in the second year.

The Diamond Sorter

In 1978, at about sixteen, he took a train to Bombay with very little money. He found work as a diamond sorter at Mahendra Brothers, a trading house, learning to grade stones by eye.

Within two or three years he had set up on his own as a diamond broker in Zaveri Bazaar, the city’s jewellery market. Broking is a business with no inventory and no plant. You make money by knowing who wants to buy, who wants to sell, and by being trusted by both. It is the same skill, scaled up, that runs through everything he did afterwards.

He has said in interviews that Bombay taught him to take risks, because in the diamond market a single deal could make or lose a year’s income. He was not yet twenty.

The Plastics Unit

In 1981 his elder brother, Mahasukhbhai, bought a small plastics unit in Ahmedabad and asked Gautam to come home and run it. The unit made PVC film. It needed a steady supply of its raw material, polyvinyl chloride, and in a licence-bound economy that supply was scarce.

So he started importing it. That was the turn that mattered. To keep a small factory fed, he learned how to buy commodities abroad, clear them through Indian ports, and sell the surplus to other small manufacturers. By the mid-1980s he was importing primary polymers for a wide network of small-scale industries.

In 1986 he married Priti, a dentist from Ahmedabad. She later took charge of the group’s charitable work and chairs the Adani Foundation.

Adani Exports, 1988

In 1988 he founded Adani Exports, a commodities trading house. It is the company now called Adani Enterprises, and it still sits at the top of the group.

The timing was lucky. In 1991 India began dismantling its licence system and cutting import duties. A trader who already knew how to move goods across borders was suddenly working in a much larger market. Adani Exports traded agricultural goods, metals, textiles and power equipment, and grew quickly. It listed on the stock exchanges in 1994.

By then he had noticed that the most profitable link in the chain was not the goods. It was the place where they came ashore.

The Port on the Salt Flats

In the early 1990s the Gujarat government was looking for private companies to develop its long coastline. The multinational Cargill had planned to export salt from the Kutch coast and wanted a jetty at Mundra. When Cargill pulled out, Adani took over the project.

Mundra was a salt marsh on the Gulf of Kutch — flat, remote and far from any city. It did, however, have deep natural water close to the shore, which is what a port needs most. The first berth opened in 1998.

From there it grew into the largest privately operated port in India, with a special economic zone, a railway line and industrial land built around it. The port company, now Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, went on to run terminals along both of India’s coasts and, from 2023, the port of Haifa in Israel, bought with a local partner.

Mundra is the key to understanding the group. Once he owned the port, he could bring in coal, burn it in a power station next door, and send the electricity down his own transmission lines. Each new business fed the last one.

Two Nights

Two episodes from his life appear in almost every account of it.

In January 1998 he was abducted in Ahmedabad along with a business associate and held for ransom. Both men were released. The case took twenty years to reach a verdict and ended with the accused being acquitted.

On 26 November 2008 he was having dinner at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai when the terrorist attack on the city began. He spent the night hidden in the hotel’s basement with other guests and walked out the next morning.

He rarely talks about either. When he does, it is usually to say that they taught him not to fear things he could not control.

Power, Airports, Cement

Through the 2000s and 2010s the group moved steadily into infrastructure that the Indian state had struggled to build alone.

Adani Power, set up in 1996, became one of India’s largest private thermal power producers. The group added electricity transmission, city gas distribution, coal trading and a coal mine at Carmichael in Queensland, Australia. The Carmichael mine drew years of protest and shipped its first coal in December 2021.

Then it turned towards renewables. Adani Green Energy, listed in 2018, became one of the world’s larger solar and wind developers. At Khavda, in the Rann of Kutch, it is building a renewable energy park planned at 30 gigawatts.

In 2019 the group won the right to run six Indian airports in a single round of bidding. In 2021 it took over Mumbai’s international airport and began building the new Navi Mumbai airport across the harbour. In 2022 it bought the Indian cement businesses of the Swiss company Holcim — Ambuja Cements and ACC — for roughly $10.5 billion, making it India’s second-largest cement maker overnight. The same year it took control of the television broadcaster NDTV.

For a while the market valued all of it enormously. In September 2022 Forbes briefly ranked him the second-richest person in the world.

The Hindenburg Report

On 24 January 2023 the American short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report accusing the group of stock manipulation and accounting fraud, including the use of offshore shell companies. Hindenburg had bet against Adani bonds and securities traded abroad, and said so.

The group rejected every allegation, called the report a malicious attack and published a 413-page rebuttal. The damage came anyway. Adani shares fell sharply, and at the lowest point the listed companies had lost more than $100 billion of market value. A ₹20,000 crore share sale by Adani Enterprises, already fully subscribed, was withdrawn on 1 February 2023 to protect investors.

An expert committee appointed by India’s Supreme Court reported in May 2023 that it could not, at that stage, find a regulatory failure. In January 2024 the Supreme Court declined to move the investigation away from the market regulator, SEBI. Hindenburg Research itself shut down in January 2025. In September 2025 SEBI closed proceedings on the part of the allegations concerning related-party transactions, saying it had found no violation.

Most of the lost market value was recovered in the following years. The questions about governance did not disappear so easily, and the episode is now part of how the group is seen, in India and abroad.

The American Indictment

In November 2024 federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment charging Gautam Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani and others with securities fraud and conspiracy. The case alleged a plan to pay Indian officials roughly $265 million in bribes to secure solar power contracts, and that American investors had been misled about it. The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a parallel civil case.

The group said the charges were baseless and that it would pursue every legal remedy. Adani Green Energy cancelled a US-dollar bond sale it had been about to launch.

It is worth being precise here. An indictment is an accusation, not a finding. Gautam Adani has not been convicted of anything, and he denies the allegations.

What He Is Building For

On his sixtieth birthday in June 2022 his family pledged ₹60,000 crore to charity, for health care, education and skills training. When his younger son, Jeet, married in February 2025, the family announced a further pledge of ₹10,000 crore.

His elder son, Karan, runs the ports business. In 2024 Adani said publicly that he intends to step back around the age of seventy, in the early 2030s, and hand the group to his sons and nephews.

The measure of him depends heavily on who is measuring. To his supporters he is the man who built India’s ports, power grids and airports faster than the state could. To his critics he is a case study in how closely big business and politics can grow together. Both groups agree on one thing: few people in India have ever built so much physical infrastructure in a single lifetime.

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