Indian College Dropout Dethrones Jeff Bezos As Second-Richest Person

Indian tycoon Gautam Adani overtook Amazon's Jeff Bezos as the world's second richest person with a net worth of $147 billion as of Sept. 16, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.

From 14th place at the start of the year, Adani rapidly climbed the billionaires' ladder putting Bezos in third place and is now behind Tesla Ceo Elon Musk who remains at the top of the list with a whopping net worth of $264 billion.

According to CNN, the Indian business mogul is the first Asian who has ranked that high on the Bloomberg list that has been dominated by white entrepreneurs for the longest time.

Shares of Adani Enterprises Ltd. lept more than 1,000% since June and hit an all-time high in this week alone.

Adani’s fortune comes from the Adani Group conglomerate that caters to the energy and utilities, transportation, logistics and incubation sectors.

The 60-year-old is actually a college dropout who tried his luck in Mumbai’s diamond industry in the 1980s before shifting his focus to coal and ports. His business expanded since then from airports, data centers, cement, media and green energy.

He is now the owner of India’s largest private-sector port and airport operators, distributor of city gas and a coal mining empire. But his hustle does not stop there as he also aspires to be the world’s largest renewable-energy producer in the future.

Before hitting the second spot on the Bloomberg billionaires list, Adani first overtook India’s Mukesh Ambani as Asia’s richest just last February.

He was able to immediately dethrone Microsoft’s Bill Gates and LVMH's Bernard Arnault who owns some of the most luxurious fashion and beauty brands in the world such as Bulgari, Fendi, Louis Vuitton and Sephora.

Bezos’s net worth on the other hand had slumped to $145.8 billion according to Bloomberg due to a tech selloff Friday that pounded the fortunes of some of America’s richest.

Amazon.com Inc.’s drop was said to be the result of the 26% decrease of the company’s shares this year.