Adani's Survival Story

A story about how Gautam Adani went from being a college dropout to becoming the 3rd richest person in the world, with some dramatic life events along the way.

"He's a college dropout - at 18 drops out and becomes a diamond sorter. After a couple years of sorting diamonds, he starts his own diamond brokerage. At age 20, he's working as a diamond broker when his brother calls him up and says 'Hey brother, I have a small plastic factory that I own now.'

He helps scale up the plastic factory, and then starts importing the materials that come upstream of plastics. He creates an export company and just keeps creating these companies. Now he has 7 publicly listed companies - the Adani Group is the mega one, then they'll start Adani Power, Adani Trading, Adani Real Estate.

He's got these crazy stories - he was in that Indian 9/11 thing where there was a terrorist attack on a hotel. He was in the hostage group that was there. He was also kidnapped at one time and taken ransom for $2 million. They paid it and he got free.

Now he's the 3rd richest man on earth, but there's skepticism because they have so much debt in their companies. He's constantly trying to acquire companies - they just bought the largest cement producer in India. The question is: is this all a house of cards that's going to fall over and you're going to see a guy go from number 3 richest to falling off the list completely, or is he actually going to pull this off?"