India's First Family: The Ambani Game of Thrones

On the evening of June 18, 2005, one of the great industrial fortunes of the age was divided not by a court, nor by a board of directors, but by a mother. Kokilaben Ambani, widow of the founder, announced that “with the blessings of Shrinathji” she had “amicably resolved” all issues between her two sons. For the better part of three years, Mukesh and Anil Ambani had been at war over Reliance, the empire their father had built and then, in 2002, left behind without a will. The feud had spilled into the newspapers, rattled investors, and alarmed the government; India’s finance minister publicly urged the brothers to settle their private dispute privately, lest it damage the nation’s capital markets. A family quarrel had become a matter of state.

How the Ambanis arrived at that night — and what each brother did after it — is a compressed history of modern Indian capitalism, and one of the sharpest parables anywhere of what succession planning is for.

The Clerk from Aden

Dhirubhai Ambani was born in 1932 in Chorwad, a village in Gujarat, the son of a poorly paid schoolteacher. His formal education ended with secondary school. At seventeen he sailed for Aden — then a British colony, now part of Yemen — to join his elder brother, pumping gas before landing a clerkship at A. Besse & Co., one of the largest trading houses east of Suez. The port taught him trade, bookkeeping, logistics — and nerve. Legend holds that he made his first money melting Yemeni rial coins whose silver was worth more than their face value. He offered small shopkeepers partnership on startling terms: profits shared, losses his alone. He would spend a rupee on tea at a five-star hotel rather than twenty-five paise at a street stall, because at the hotel he could listen to businessmen talk.

In 1958 he returned to Bombay with about 15,000 rupees — roughly $3,000 — and founded Reliance Commercial Corporation with a cousin from his Aden days, in a 350-square-foot office holding one telephone, one desk, and three chairs. They imported polyester yarn and exported spices. The cousin was cautious; Dhirubhai was not; they parted ways in 1965. Alone, he launched a textile brand, Vimal, aimed squarely at India’s emerging middle class: the newest machinery, dependable quality at bearable prices, and advertising on a scale Indian textiles had never seen. By day he worked the factory; by evening he called on shopkeepers to place the product himself. His maxims entered Indian business folklore — “Think big, think fast, think ahead”; ideas, he liked to say, are no one’s monopoly — and behind them sat one fixed strategic idea: integrate backward, from cloth to polyester to petrochemicals to refining, until you control the chain that feeds you.

The Polyester Prince

Dhirubhai’s second invention was financial. In 1977 Reliance Textile Industries went public — 2.8 million shares, oversubscribed seven times, a response without precedent in India, drawing crowds of first-time investors. He turned annual meetings into festivals, renting stadiums for tens of thousands of shareholders and promising them dividends and growth from the stage: he dreamed, he told them, of a day when every ordinary Indian would share in industrial wealth — and they were the partners making the dream come true. Reliance became “the people’s company,” and its army of small shareholders its most loyal constituency. When a Calcutta bear syndicate raided the stock in 1982, Dhirubhai’s allies bought everything the short sellers dumped and demanded physical delivery; the squeeze forced the Bombay exchange to close for three unprecedented days and sealed his reputation as a stock-market magician — along with durable accusations, some later formal, of price manipulation and tax evasion.

The rise unfolded inside the License Raj, when production, imports, and expansion all required government permission, and success depended as much on Delhi as on the market. Critics — most famously the Australian journalist Hamish McDonald, whose book “The Polyester Prince” was banned in India — charged that Dhirubhai cultivated politicians, bent policy, and crushed rivals through the state. In the polyester wars against Bombay Dyeing and its chief, Nusli Wadia, import duties fell on the feedstock Reliance had chosen and stayed punishing on the one its rival used. There were allegations of favoritism in the Panna-Mukta oilfield award, of a pre-election duty exemption in 1977, of licenses granted to Reliance first. Defenders answered that in that system, breaking through the bureaucracy required bending it — and that Dhirubhai created industrial capacity, jobs, and shareholder wealth on a scale India had never seen. His own gloss was franker than either camp: “We cannot change our rulers, but we can change the way they rule us.”

The machine kept climbing the chain he had drawn: a polyester filament plant in 1980, a vast petrochemical complex in the early 1990s, and between 1998 and 2000 the world’s largest single-site refinery. In 2002 Reliance announced India’s biggest natural-gas discovery in nearly three decades, in the Krishna-Godavari basin. That July, Dhirubhai died of a heart attack at sixty-nine — leaving no will and no succession plan.

A Kingdom Without a Will

Mukesh was forty-five, Anil forty-three. The elder became chairman and managing director, the younger joint managing director — a subtle imbalance set atop two entrenched power systems, for their father had assigned Mukesh production and projects, Anil finance and the outside world. The dual arrangement had worked while its arbiter lived. Without him, the flaw at the heart of the enterprise stood exposed: there was no rule for deciding who ruled.

By 2004 Mukesh conceded publicly that there were “ownership issues.” Through the first half of 2005 the brothers fought in the open — statements, leaks, accusations of opacity on one side and assertions of boardroom authority on the other — while the prime minister’s government fretted over market confidence. It fell to Kokilaben, aided by trusted outsiders, above all the ICICI banker K. V. Kamath, whom the brothers called “uncle,” to negotiate the partition. The settlement gave Mukesh the core: Reliance Industries, with its petrochemicals, refining, oil and gas, and textiles — the cash cows. Anil received the new economy: telecom, power, financial services, entertainment, and infrastructure, gathered into the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. The division was reckoned at roughly 70:30 in Mukesh’s favor, and sealed with a non-compete pact meant to run until 2016 but scrapped in 2010.

Two Brothers, Two Fates

What followed was a controlled experiment in inheritance. Mukesh — deliberate and reserved where his father had been flamboyant — poured the old businesses’ cash into three new engines. In 2016 he launched Reliance Jio, whose near-free calls and cut-rate 4G data upended the Indian telecom market, made Jio the country’s largest operator, and drew billions from Meta and Google. Reliance Retail became India’s biggest merchant — more than 18,000 stores by the end of 2024, with the JioMart platform knitting in millions of corner kirana shops. Then a third act: a pledge of net-zero carbon by 2035, anchored by an initial commitment of some $10 billion to a 5,000-acre green-energy complex at Jamnagar — solar, electrolyzers, fuel cells, batteries — stocked with acquired technology: REC Solar, Faradion, Lithium Werks, SenseHawk. Reliance’s market value climbed, and with it Mukesh’s standing as India’s, at times Asia’s, richest man.

Anil’s inheritance curdled. Reliance Communications bet early on CDMA technology and fell behind rivals in the GSM and 4G eras; it borrowed heavily to catch up just as Jio — his brother’s creation — destroyed the industry’s pricing. RCom shut its wireless business in 2017 and entered bankruptcy in 2019. Reliance Capital, drained by loans to ailing sister companies and battered by the 2018 shadow-banking crisis — its auditor, PwC, resigned over doubts about the books — was seized by the Reserve Bank in 2021. Power and infrastructure ventures stalled under debt and disputes; forays into defense and entertainment fizzled. Having personally guaranteed group borrowings, Anil told a London court in 2020 that his net worth was zero; regulators later fined him and barred him from the securities market for five years over diverted funds at Reliance Home Finance.

The brothers’ fates had many authors — strategy, markets, temperament — but the original sin was structural: a founder who built a two-headed empire and never chose, leaving the division itself to do the choosing. And the division mattered. Mukesh inherited businesses that gushed cash for new bets; Anil got capital-hungry, regulation-sensitive growth businesses that punished every error. The saga’s most quoted rescue came in 2019, when Anil faced jail over some 5.5 billion rupees owed to Ericsson and Mukesh paid at the final hour. The families now appear together at weddings, and a 2013 network-sharing agreement marked their first cooperation since the split. Those who watch them closely describe not reconciliation so much as pragmatic coexistence — the public fire out, the old intimacy unproven.

Rehearsing the Third Act

Mukesh drew the lesson in full. His three children were educated at the Dhirubhai Ambani International School — founded in 2003 by his wife, Nita — and then abroad: Isha at Yale and Stanford, her twin, Akash, and the youngest, Anant, at Brown. Each was routed early into a distinct engine — Akash to Jio, Isha to retail, Anant to new energy — a deliberate specialization designed so that no two siblings would ever compete for the same chair. From around 2014 they took directorships in key subsidiaries; in August 2023 all three joined the Reliance Industries board together, while Nita stepped off it to lead the Reliance Foundation, remaining a permanent invitee to every board meeting. Mukesh announced he would stay chairman until 2029, his role shifting to mentoring what he calls the next generation’s “collective leadership.” Reports describe a design studied from cases like the Waltons: a family trust to hold the controlling stake, with Mukesh, Nita, and the three children as trustees, and a family council — perhaps with outside advisers — to write the rules the last transition never had.

The family’s women mark the other great revision. Dhirubhai’s daughters, Nina and Dipti, married into other business houses and were quietly compensated out of any claim during the brothers’ war — the old script, in which even shareholding women yield the stage. Kokilaben’s mediation showed what that script wasted. Nita built the school; the foundation, whose programs in rural development, health, education, and sport are said to reach tens of millions; the Mumbai Indians cricket franchise; and the chairmanship of an $8.5 billion media venture with Disney. Isha now stands level with her twin at the front of the succession — her father insists all three children stand equally at the forefront. At Stanford she named her idol: her grandfather, who proved that an ordinary man could build something extraordinary.

The third generation performs its unity as studiously as the second performed its feud. Anant has said there is no rivalry among the siblings — that Isha mothers him, that Akash is his Rama and he the loyal Hanuman. The cousins across the family’s old divide — Anil’s sons among them — socialize privately and appear at one another’s weddings. Whether the harmony is temperament or training hardly matters; it is policy now, cultivated as deliberately as any refinery.

The Ambani story thus closes its first circle where family sagas usually do: with the recognition, bought at ruinous price, that fortunes rarely die of market failure — they die of succession failure. Dhirubhai built the empire and left it a riddle; his sons spent a decade and a great fortune working it out; the survivor has spent the years since making sure the riddle is never posed again. Whether three heirs can rule jointly what their father would not divide is a question for the years ahead. What is already written is the lesson their grandfather taught by omission: in a family business, love is not a governance structure.