Mukesh Ambani is now world’s fifth-richest man

Mukesh Ambani (63) chairs a £70 billion ($88 billion) oil and gas giant Reliance Industries among India’s most valuable companies, a company founded by his father Dhirubhai Ambani, a yarn trader, in 1966 as a small textile manufacturer.

In 2016, Reliance sparked a price war in India’s hyper-competitive telecom market with the launch of 4G phone service  Jio.

Jio signed 340 million customers by offering free domestic voice and data services and free smartphones.

Mukesh Ambani is now the world’s fifth-richest man surpassing Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO Warren Buffett’s £57bn ($72.7 billion) as of Wednesday.

His Jio platform got more than $15billion in investment from companies including Facebook Inc and Silver Lake. Google agreed to buy a $4.5bn stake in Jio Platforms Ltd.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos leads the list with £146bn ($185.8bn) followed by Bill Gates of Microsoft with £89b ($113.1 billion) of wealth.