Mukesh Ambani on Capital Allocation

At age 24 Ambani was handed responsibility for the Patalganga petrochemical plant while Reliance was deepening its oil refining and petrochemicals bet. He subsequently directed construction of the Jamnagar grassroots refinery, which by 2010 could process 660,000 barrels per day and was integrated with petrochemicals, power, ports and supporting infrastructure — the world's largest single-location grassroots refinery at the time.

In December 2013 Ambani flagged a possible digital-infrastructure collaboration with Bharti Airtel for 4G in India, and at the June 2014 AGM committed Rs 1.8 trillion of investment across businesses over three years with 4G broadband services targeted for 2015. The scale of the bet — capital committed before a single rupee of telecom revenue — was unprecedented in Indian corporate history.

After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Reliance continued buying Russian crude even as Western buyers pulled back; by 2025 India was sourcing about 42% of its oil from Russia versus 3% in 2021, with Reliance the largest Indian importer. The stance reflected a commercial willingness to navigate around Western sanctions — and to keep Jamnagar running at high utilization.

In 2020 Jio Platforms attracted roughly $13 billion in fresh investment in months, led by Facebook's $5.8 billion and later Google's $4.5 billion, alongside sovereign and private-capital cheques. Ambani summarized the thesis in a 2017 interview: 'Data is the new natural resource. We are at the beginning of an era where data is the new oil' — a striking metaphor from an oil refining fortune.

In a near-two-hour conversation with Times of India journalists days after the Jio launch, Ambani disclosed that the project had consumed roughly six years and Rs 150,000 crore to build — capital deployed before seeing one dollar of revenue. He framed Jio not as a telecom operator but as a tech venture, the 'world's largest start-up,' and a bet on mobile internet as this century's defining technology.

Markets punished incumbent telcos the moment Ambani unveiled Jio. Bharti Airtel's stock dropped 8.5% — about $1.3 billion of market value — and Idea Cellular shed roughly 7%, wiping over $500 million, on the day of the announcement. Even Reliance Industries itself dipped 3% as investors absorbed the cost of the price war it had just ignited.

The telecom bet, he argued, was about picking a winning horse early: 'We saw mobile internet as the winning horse before anybody else did.' Companies that had backed mobile internet, he noted, had created the largest shareholder value over the prior decade, and he intended Jio to capture that compounding rather than chase the legacy carrier model.