Asia's Richest Billionaires

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, chairperson of the Adani Group, is currently embroiled in a fraud scandal. Last week, U.S. federal prosecutors accused him of being involved in a $265 million bribery scheme to secure solar energy projects in India as well as misleading investors and lenders. The Adani Group has denied accusations.

According to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List, as of November 25, 62-year-old Gautam Adani is the second richest man in Asia. He is the chairperson of the Adani Group, a conglomerate that deals with businesses exporting and importing raw materials and finished goods, including coal trading, mining, oil and gas exploration, as well as ports, energy and agricultural commodities.

As the following chart shows, Adani follows only after Mukesh Ambani (67), who has a net worth of $101.9 billion and is the chairman of Reliance Industries Limited, a conglomerate that focuses not only on petrochemicals, but also textiles and telecommunications. He ranks 17th on Forbes’ worldwide list, which is headed by Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X formerly Twitter) with $328.3 billion, Larry Ellison (Oracle) with $232.6 billion and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) with $221.7 billion.

In third position comes Zhong Shanshan (69), with a net worth of $51.5 billion. Shanshan is the founder of beverages company Nongfu Spring as well as the founder of Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise, a private Chinese company and major supplier of Covid-19 testing kits.

Rounding off the top ten comes Savitri Jindal (74), the widow of Om Prakash Jindal who founded the Jindal Group in India, whose interests lay in steel, power, cement and infrastructure, with an estimated net worth of $39.2 billion, followed by Robin Zeng (55), founder, chairman and CEO of Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), one of the world's largest suppliers of batteries for electric vehicles, with $37.3 billion. The top ten richest people in Asia have a total net worth of $508.9 billion.