International Desk: Gautam Adani was having dinner in a restaurant of the hotel when the gunmen started attacking the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, India on the night of November 26, 2008. Gautam Adani’s position is still number 10 in the list of the top richest people in India.
Shooting from all sides and throwing grenades, the gunmen entered the hotel. Ten heavily armed militants, all Pakistani nationals, arrived in Mumbai by sea that evening. They split into two groups and hijacked some cars. The targets that were then attacked were two elite hotels.
These attackers virtually held Mumbai hostage for nearly 60 hours. 166 people were killed in the incident, and the attack further soured relations between India and Pakistan.
Gautam Adani later told India Today magazine that during the attack, the hotel staff took all the guests who had come to dine at the restaurant and hid them in a place in the basement. Later they were again taken to an upper floor of the hotel. A bloody conflict is still going on outside.
There were more than a hundred guests in the hotel hall that day. “Some of them were hiding under sofas, many of them took positions in places where they could escape, and some of them were praying for their lives”, he said, recalling the events of that day.
Adani himself sat on a sofa and told others to trust in God. Sitting there, he called his family in his hometown Ahmedabad. Outside the hotel, his car driver and security guards are waiting nervously.
After staying overnight in the hotel lobby, Gautam Adani and the other hostages were rescued the next morning by Indian commandos and brought out through the back door.
“I saw people dying from a distance of just 15 feet”, he told reporters later on a private jet back to Ahmedabad.
Fourteen years after the incident, Adani (60) is now the third richest person in the world – behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. His business empire is vast – from ports to energy companies, his investments in various sectors. Seven of his group companies are listed on the stock market. 23 thousand workers work in his institutions. The market value of his companies is 230 billion dollars, that is 23 trillion dollars.
But this week he is in the news for almost completing the purchase of India’s most prestigious television news network, NDTV. This is Gautam Adani’s first major investment in the world of media.
One reason why Gautam Adani became a multi-millionaire so quickly after dropping out of school and starting a business is his ability to take risks.
But before he became so famous, he had a narrow escape in January 1998. He and an accomplice were abducted from their car at gunpoint by a group of men in Ahmedabad. They were demanding ransom.
But the two main suspects in the case were released in 2018. Because despite repeated requests from the court, neither Gautam Adani nor his associates appeared in the court to testify in this case.
Adani has always described himself as a ‘small businessman’. He does not want to talk about these events in his own life. Only once he told a journalist, two or three unfortunate incidents happened in my life.
Gautam Adani left school at the age of 16 and moved to Mumbai to start a business. He started a diamond business in the busy commercial area of Mumbai. But this business did not last long, after two years he returned to his home state of Gujarat. There he took charge of a packaging factory run by his brother.
Adani comes from a middle class family, their family business was textiles. He started trading in commodities in 1998, building his own business. After that, however, he did not have to stop. Over the next 24 years he invested in one business after another with loans. Ports, mines, railways, infrastructure, power, real estate – there is no sector where the Adani Group does not have investments.
According to an analyst, among India’s new generation of tycoons, no one has been seen to invest as recklessly as Gautam Adani. He is now number one in infrastructure sector business in India.
He owns the second largest cement factory in India. It owns 13 ports. It also has India’s largest port at Mundra in the western subdistrict. He also runs seven airports. He is building India’s longest expressway between Delhi and Mumbai.
Adani is the largest private sector entrepreneur in India’s power sector, owning six coal-fired power plants. In addition, he promised to invest 50 billion dollars in environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel.
His company also operates eight thousand km long gas pipelines in India. He bought many coal mines in Indonesia and Australia. He wants to become the largest trader in the renewable energy sector by 2030.
The speed and scope with which his business expanded is comparable to that of industrialists of earlier eras. James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj: Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, wrote, “Unable to rely on India’s dilapidated infrastructure, he built his own railway lines and power plants. Unable to access domestic coal mines, he went to Indonesia and Australia to buy coal mines, then brought the coal to his own ports.
