Adani Enterprises

Adani dropped out of school at 16 and moved to Mumbai in 1978 to work as a diamond sorter for Mahendra Brothers, deliberately avoiding his father's textile trade. In 1981 he returned to Ahmedabad to manage elder brother Mahasukhbhai's plastics unit, which became his gateway to global trading via PVC imports and led to the 1988 founding of Adani Exports — today's Adani Enterprises, the group's holding company.

From 2009-2012, Adani acquired Abbot Point Port and the Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, Australia — controversial bets that drew sustained environmental opposition and became a recurring flashpoint in the global coal debate. The assets also marked Adani's first major overseas infrastructure footprint beyond trading.

In May 2020 Adani Green won the world's largest solar bid — an $6 billion, 8,000 MW photovoltaic plant from Solar Energy Corporation of India — with Adani Solar adding 2,000 MW of cell and module manufacturing. The pivot from thermal to renewables was sudden and headline-grabbing, positioning Adani as a green-energy champion alongside his coal assets.

September 2020 brought a 74% acquisition of Mumbai International Airport, India's second-busiest. In May 2022 the Adani family bought Ambuja Cements and ACC from Holcim for $10.5 billion via an overseas special-purpose entity, extending the infrastructure empire into building materials — a vertical that uses ports, power and logistics in concert.

Adani Enterprises was preparing a $1 billion share sale by mid-September 2024, having shelved the record $2.5 billion FPO withdrawn in the wake of Hindenburg's first allegations. Adani Energy separately raised $1 billion from U.S. investors and sovereign wealth funds earlier that month — evidence that capital-markets access, while impaired, had not been fully shut off.

By 1998, Adani Exports had become the country's top net foreign-exchange earner and the largest private-sector Superstar Trading House in India, ten years after founding. The scale-up trajectory from commodity trader to top-ranked trading house in a decade established the cash-flow base for the infrastructure bets that followed.

The 2007 Mundra Port & SEZ IPO was 116 times oversubscribed, and Adani Power Ltd's 2009 IPO was 21x subscribed. The capital-markets access these IPOs unlocked fueled the overseas mine acquisitions in Indonesia (Bunyu, 2008) and Australia (Carmichael, 2010-2011), marking Adani's transition from domestic infrastructure operator to global resource player.

The timing of publication, just ahead of Adani Enterprises' $2.5 billion follow-on public offering opening January 27, 2023, was strategically chosen to maximize damage. Adani Group CFO Jugeshinder 'Robbie' Singh called it a 'brazen, mala fide intention' to sabotage the FPO; the FPO was withdrawn on February 1, 2023, after stock prices cratered and Adani fell from 3rd to 22nd on Forbes' billionaires tracker.