In just 6 days, Indian billionaire Gautam Adani has moved from third place in the list of the world’s richest people to 21st place in the last few days.
Data prepared by Al-Arabiya shows the Indian billionaire’s net worth has shrunk by 49% in 6 days as it fell from $120 billion to around $61.3 billion now, with a loss of around $58. 7 billion dollars. to lower his ranking in the list of the richest people in the world to 21st place.
According to Bloomberg, Adani is not exactly like Cryptocurrency’s Sam Bankman Freed or Argos Capital Management’s Bill Huang, who went from tens of billions to nothing in an instant when their leverage trades collapsed.
Even as stock prices collapsed following Hindenburg Research’s short selling report, Gautam Adani oversees a sprawling group building capital-intensive infrastructure such as ports and airports in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s development goals.
Adani’s decline in wealth was much greater than Brazil’s AEK Batista, which similarly used its raw material empire to build national infrastructure such as shipyards and ports with government support. It took Batista about a year to lose his $35 billion fortune and become the first known “negative billionaire”.
And while Elon Musk was the first person in history to lose $200 billion, he has since rebounded significantly. The Tesla CEO added about $36.5 billion to his personal fortune this year, the largest increase among the world’s richest people.
Overall, Adani’s loss of wealth is one of the most severe in scope and speed since Bloomberg began tracking billionaires in 2012. His net worth is $61 billion, up from a peak of $150 billion in September.
The sharp drop highlights the unique ways in which the 60-year-old Adani has risen in the wealth rankings over the past two years, at one point surpassing every billionaire except Elon Musk. Many of the tactics were noted by the Hindenburg because they claimed fraud with a high concentration of insider capital, rampant use of leverage, and overvaluation in almost every metric.
Adani aggressively expanded his group, in particular by promoting green energy and infrastructure, as well as attracting investments from companies. His group has used margin loans to finance its ambitions, and last week it had to invest about $300 million of its own capital to maintain collateral for a loan provided by a group of banks.
The Adani group has repeatedly denied Hindenburg’s accusations, calling the report “fake” and threatening legal action. However, Adani Enterprise canceled a subsequent $2.4 billion share sale that was fully underwritten but generated little interest from retail investors, and units of Credit Suisse Group and Citigroup stopped accepting some of the group’s securities as collateral for loans.
It is not yet clear to what extent the Indian government will intervene. Parliament was closed after a frenzy when the speaker of the Senate denied opposition MPs a request to hold a debate on Adani. So far, the Prime Minister of India has not commented on this issue.
Meanwhile, the State Bank of India, the country’s biggest financier, has lent Adani’s companies up to $2.6 billion, about half the amount allowed.
“Adhani and his officials are doing their best to present this as a foreign conspiracy against the rise of India as an economic power,” says Ashok Soin, chair of peace and conflict studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. didn’t buy into this hype. As Adhani’s shares have been falling for a week now, the national side is slowly losing its importance.
