Chairman, Reliance Industries
Age: 50
The chairman of the $23 billion Reliance Industries group, India’s second largest private sector conglomerate, has interests in petrochemicals, oil and gas and synthetic fibre. A chemical engineer, Reliance Industires is credited with setting up the world’s largest greenfield oil refinery in Gujarat. His latest passion is infrastructure and retail. A very public split with younger brother Anil in 2005, saw Ambani pass on some of his favorite businesses like telecom, which he had set up. He is now aggressively bidding for oil blocks around the world. Ambani, like his father Dhirubhai, is close to the powers that be. He was with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer at Stanford University before both of them dropped out.
