Coal Baron or Climate Warrior? The Dizzying Rise of Asia’s Richest Man.

He and his family tightly control his conglomerate. He is the chairman of all six of its publicly listed entities, and his brother, son and nephews hold executive posts. As the enterprise has taken on huge levels of debt to finance its rapid expansion, a Fitch Ratings subsidiary has warned of high “key man” risk, with the conglomerate so firmly connected to Mr. Adani.

Most of his extended family lives within a mile of his compound in Ahmedabad, according to Girish Dani, a neighbor and longtime family friend. Mr. Adani and his family, including his wife, Priti, a dentist who runs the family foundation, are adherents of Jainism, a religion that emphasizes asceticism.

“He is very soft-spoken and mild. But in a decision, he’s very firm,” Mr. Dani said.

R.N. Bhaskar, a journalist who has written two biographies of Mr. Adani, the first commissioned by the family and the second set for publication next month, said the industrialist still operated the way he did as a teenager in Mumbai.

A diamond trader has to be “lightning quick in your responses, and a hustler, with the ability to think fast, calculate numbers and risk, size up customers and collateral and operate on wafer-thin margins,” he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/business/gautam-adani-coal-climate.html