Gautam Adani faces off against Kumar Mangalam Birla over cement in India

Kumar Mangalam Birla comes from old money, unlike Adani, a first-generation entrepreneur

Gautam Adani’s meteoric rise to the world’s ninth-richest person began with a port on India’s west coast in the 1990s and an abiding friendship with a politician who’s now prime minister. The rest has been all about finding the next industry that will make his debt-fueled empire a little bigger.
 

The port brought in coal, liquefied gas and palm oil — and so Adani got into them and adjacent businesses. For example, once he had begun supplying coal to power plants, he entered mining — in India, Indonesia and Australia — and his own electricity generation and distribution.