Gautam Adani: How A High School Dropout Became Asia's Richest Man

Gautam Adani is the world’s third-richest man – behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. And he is a college dropout.

BBC News reported that he runs an expansive port-to-energy conglomerate with seven publicly traded companies, 23,000 employees, and a market capitalization of more than $230bn (S$310bn).

Adani has been dominating the headlines recently because he is close to acquiring NDTV, India’s most esteemed news network, and it would be his first and most important media venture, BBC reports.

Business over academics

Born June 24, 1962, in a Jain family in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Adani has 7 siblings. His father was a small textile merchant. Adani was educated at Sheth Chimanlal Nagindas Vidyalaya school in Ahmedabad. He enrolled for a bachelor’s degree in commerce at Gujarat University but decided to drop out after the second year, The Economic Times reported.

In 1978, Adani still a teenager, moved to Mumbai to work as a diamond sorter for Mahendra Brothers.

Then in 1981, when his elder brother Mahasukhbhai Adani bought a plastics unit in Ahmedabad, Gautam was invited to manage the operations. This undertaking turned out to be Adani’s entry into global trading through polyvinyl chloride (PVC) imports.

The economic liberalization policies of his country in 1991 turned out to be advantageous to his company, thus, enabling him to begin expanding his operations into trading metals, textiles, and agricultural products, according to The Hindu Business Line.

Bloomberg reported that Adani entered the power generation business in 2006. From 2009 to 2012, he acquired Abbot Point Port in Australia and Carmichael coal mine in Queensland.

In May 2020, Adani won the world’s largest solar bid by the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) worth US$6 billion, according to the Business Standard. Financial Express stated that the 8000MW photovoltaic power plant project was also taken up by Adani Green; Adani Solar also established 2000MW of additional solar cell and module manufacturing capacity.

In September 2020, Forbes reported that Adani acquired a 74% stake in Mumbai International Airport, India’s second busiest after Delhi.

In February 2022, he became Asia’s richest person, surpassing Mukesh Ambani. Then, in August 2022, Fortune named him the 3rd richest person in the world.

A self-made man

What drives Gautam Adani to “reach for the stars” despite his lack of academic qualifications and being a dropout?

Gautam aimed to make India one of the most substantial players in sustainable energy, so he invested in the renewable ecosystem spanning solar manufacturing, generation, and solar park businesses. He also dreamed of making India self-reliant in the fields of defence and security.

For him, nation-building meant altering India’s coastline by building a series of ports and logistics hubs.

Nation-building for Adani meant strengthening the country’s energy security and mitigating the urban-rural divide by delivering electricity to several hundreds of millions living in the hinterlands of India.

For Gautam, boosting food security and building a modern agriculture supply chain, and empowering farmers are what nation-building is all about. With his industrial endeavours, he created tens of thousands of jobs for his fellowmen. What a feat for a dropout.

Billionaire dropouts

“Getting educated inside a school” is a piece of advice often given out; advice that should be heeded if one wants to succeed. However, some dropped out of school, yet, made it big outside of the university gates, and amassed fortunes that they never dreamed of.

Here are some big names who quit their studies and became very successful billionaires:

Bill Gates – the richest man in the world, dropped out of Harvard to focus on Microsoft full-time.

Marc Zuckerberg – dropped out of Harvard to move to Silicon Valley and started his Facebook empire.

Steve Jobs – an extremely clever tech giant among the famous college dropouts.

Li Ka-shing – the richest person in Hong Kong, now worth US$35.4 billion.

Jan Koum – after dropping out of school and getting a job at Yahoo, he founded WhatsApp; he now has a net worth of US$9.9 billion.

Steven Spielberg – one of Hollywood’s all-time greats, a self-made millionaire with Oscars, Emmys, and honorary doctorates; galore-dropped out of college at age 22.

Dropout or PhDs?

Who makes the most money? Those who quit or those who persevere? Are PhD holders more financially secure? Or does the affluence of the successful dropouts obscure the academicians?

An article in Forbes indicated that there are 21 PhD holders among the richest people in the world. As of February 2020, there are 2,816 billionaires in the world.

Of the 400 richest people in the US, only 29 have a Master of Science, 35 are with Law degrees, and an enormous 63 only have high school degrees. It does not say how many did drop out of their classes.

So, the question remains – who can become more successful, the one with the paper qualification or the one who is a dropout from the university before graduation?

Another millionaire – Robert Kiyosaki – has this to say:

“It takes 18 months for a piece of information you learned to be obsolete. So, everything you learned in school is probably obsolete before you get started in the real world.”

“However, this is not the main source of concern for me. My concern is that school often teaches the exact skills that negate what is required for success in the business world.”

“It is the way schools teach that is the problem. They give young people a false idea about how the world is. For example, asking for help on a test or exam is bad at school. Meanwhile, this is super important in the real world.”

“Business is a team sport and not an individual sport. It is a sport played by accountants, lawyers, tax attorneys, bankers, etc. You have to ask for help in a test or exam to get ahead. Unfortunately, most well-schooled entrepreneurs learn this the hard way.”

In all probability, Gautam Adani thought the same way when he decided to be a dropout.