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Gautam Adani, the mining to power generation tycoon, with ports thrown in somewhere in between, has once again become India's richest man, piping “frenemy” Mukesh Ambani to the top spot in the coveted Hurun’s Rich List.
So what's really new about that? Rich men are supposed to get richer, arent they? And they are supposed to best fellow super-tycoons on the way or be beaten at the game.
Well as they sav there is always o twist in the tale, especially when it's about how one gets rich and how quickly.
Last year, Adani’s wealth declined by 57 per cent to just Rs 474 lakh crore after the Hindenburg Research report came out accusing his companies of various “wrongdoings”, (which the conglomerate of course has denied since then).
These allegations saw his group firms' shares crashing even as Mukesh Ambani came out with flving colours to take the top spot that year. This vear, stocks of his firm soared (and with it his wealth) after pre-election exit polls predicted a landslide win for the BJP. Though they did again crash somewhat when the actual results saw the BIP win but with a considerably reduced margin, Gautam Adani managed to claw back to the top slot once again with some Rs 116 lakh crore in wealth.
Let’s take the case of his flagship firm Adani Enterprises Ltd to understand how this worked.
AEL saw its shares crashing to Rs 1,31,546 on February 24, 2023, after the Hindenburg report came out, from over Rs 3,000 a month before, On June 3, 2025, the day before Parliamentary results were declared this year, the stock. which had been steadily improving, rose crazily.
The Adani group is widely believed to be close to the ruling alliance though it did rise during the period when Congress was in power too, and stock market punsters betted that it would manage to buy more ports and set up more infrastructure and logistics projects to power its rise further.
Of course AEL’s stocks fell when the election results were finally in, to 2941.25. But even after that fall it was still trading higher than where it had fallen some 16 months ago. As on Thursday closing, the firm was trading at a respectable Rs 3022 a share.
The Adani wealth, even if it is notional wealth dependant on the notoriously fickle stock market, had risen once again in the words of the Hurun report “like a phoenix”.
In short, the market slashed Adani’s notional wealth and the market gave it back to him. In between of course stout defence by various regulators, election results and a few policy changes may have helped him along.
The most recent of these policy changes was announced earlier on August 12, when rules were changed to allow his Godda power plant, set up as an SEZ to export electricity to Bangladesh in a controversial deal signed with the Sheikh Hasina government, to sell the power produced in the domestic market.
Sheikh Hasina, who fled Dhaka on August 4, is now being accused of wrongdoing on many counts by her detractors, including the many deals she signed during her 15 years in office.
Regardless of what happens to Hasina, in the years ahead Gautam Adani will probably remain one of the richest men not only in India but also globally. Even though his wealth will be on a rather shaky bedrock, always dependant on the “vagaries” of India’s volatile stock markets, which have seen many empires rise and fall in the past.
