This month, Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that Gautam Adani’s net worth had reached $100 billion, an accomplishment that makes the industrialist the only Indian member of an exclusive global group called the centibillionaire’s club. What is this club is and who are its members? What is this club and who are its members? The club refers to people whose net wealth is $100 billion or above. Although Bill Gates did have a net worth of over $100 billion in 1999 for a brief period, the term centibillionaire did not gain currency until the flamboyant founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, increased his wealth to $112 billion in 2017. It is since then that he was referred to as the world’s first centibillionaire. After that, the numbers kept increasing. By 2020, when Mark Zuckerberg joined the group, they already had four other members — Tesla’s Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Bezos and Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of luxury goods company LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton SE. Today, the club has 10 members, with Musk on top and Bezos next, followed by Arnault, Gates, and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway. Adani is tenth on the list and $3 billion below the person above him, Oracle’s Larry Ellison — whose net wealth is $103 billion. How did Adani make the cut? According to the Bloomberg report, Adani, whose interests range from ports and mines to green energy, is the biggest gainer in the Billionaires Index this year, up by almost $24 billion. “Adani’s ascent has been nothing short of spectacular. The college dropout who first made a fortune in the coal industry has amassed almost all of his wealth in the past two years, thanks to a shift to green energy and infrastructure that landed him investments from companies including France’s Total SE and Warburg Pincus,” the report read. Fortunes in the centibillionaire’s club are vulnerable to the winds of change and no one knows it better than Bezos who touched $200 billion in 2020, the first person ever to get there. Today, he is number two on the list with $179 billion, while Musk is at $260 billion. Newsletter | Click to get the day's best explainers in your inbox
