Jack Ma

Lore & Background

Ma was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, on 10 September 1964. He became interested in learning English as a young boy and practiced with tourists. After failing the gaokao twice, he passed on his third attempt in 1984 with 89 points in mathematics, but his score was five points below the minimum threshold. However, because the enrollment target for Hangzhou Normal University's Department of English was not met, some prospective students were promoted into it, and Ma was promoted to the department's foreign language major. He earned a BA in English in 1988 and became a lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. He co-founded Alibaba Group in 1999.

Reader's Guide

Ma's acceptance into Hangzhou Normal University occurred because the enrollment target for the Department of English was not met, allowing him to be promoted into the major—not because of an excellent English score. The source does not specify his English exam score.

Did You Know?

• Ma failed the gaokao twice before passing on his third attempt.
• He scored 89 points in mathematics on his third gaokao attempt, but was still five points below the minimum threshold.
• He was promoted to Hangzhou Normal University's foreign language major because the department's enrollment target was not met.

A Child of Aden and a Mumbai Commune

Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani entered the world on April 19, 1957, in the British crown colony of Aden, in what is now Yemen. His parents, Dhirubhai and Kokilaben, belonged to a Gujarati Hindu family, and his father had already established the enterprise that would grow into Reliance Industries. The family's sojourn in Yemen was brief; by 1958 they had returned to India, where Dhirubhai launched a trading operation dealing in spices and textiles under the name Vimal, later rebranded as Only Vimal. For much of Mukesh's childhood, the household occupied a modest two-bedroom flat in Bhuleshwar, Mumbai. He grew up in a communal living arrangement, commuting by public transport, and never received a personal allowance from his parents. His siblings included a younger brother, Anil, and two sisters, Nina Kothari and Dipti Salgaonkar. The family's circumstances improved gradually, and Dhirubhai eventually acquired a fourteen-storey apartment building called Sea Wind in Colaba, where Mukesh and Anil would later reside on separate floors with their own families.

The Stanford Crossroads

Before ever stepping into a boardroom, Mukesh Ambani built his academic foundation across several Indian institutions. He attended Scindia School in Gwalior for his primary years, then Hill Grange High School on Peddar Road in Mumbai for senior secondary studies, where he studied alongside Anand Jain, who would become a close professional associate. He went on to St. Xavier's College in Mumbai and earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology. In 1980, while pursuing an MBA at Stanford University—where his classmate included Steve Ballmer—he made a pivotal decision to withdraw. His father, who believed that practical wisdom came from hands-on experience rather than classroom lectures, summoned him back to India to take the helm of a yarn manufacturing project at Reliance, which at the time was still a small but rapidly expanding concern. Mukesh later credited two of his Stanford professors, William F. Sharpe and Man Mohan Sharma, with teaching him to think beyond conventional boundaries, a mindset that would shape his approach to business for decades.

From Petrochemicals to a Multinational Portfolio

By his mid-twenties, Mukesh Ambani was already steering major industrial projects. At twenty-four, he was handed responsibility for constructing the Patalganga petrochemical plant during a period of heavy capital investment in refineries and petrochemicals. His most ambitious undertaking was overseeing the construction of the world's largest petroleum refinery built from the ground up in Jamnagar, a facility that by 2010 was processing 660,000 barrels of crude daily and integrating petrochemical production, power generation, and port infrastructure. In 2013, he floated a potential digital-infrastructure partnership with Bharti Airtel for India's 4G rollout, and in 2014 he committed roughly 1.8 trillion rupees in multi-year investment across the group's businesses. Over the years he broadened Reliance's reach into finance, healthcare, media, telecommunications, and sports, acquiring the Mumbai Indians IPL franchise and founding the Indian Super League football competition. In 2016, the National Academy of Engineering elected him a member in recognition of his leadership in refining and petrochemicals, and he became the first non-American to sit on the board of Bank of America.

Fortune, Scrutiny, and the Weight of Power

By mid-2026, Mukesh Ambani's personal fortune stood at approximately 91.8 billion US dollars, placing him twenty-second among the world's wealthiest individuals and at the top of the Asian ranking. He had overtaken Alibaba's Jack Ma in July 2018 to claim the title of Asia's richest person, and for a decade he held the top spot on Forbes' list of India's wealthiest. Bloomberg's Robin Hood Index estimated in 2018 that his wealth could sustain the Indian federal government's operations for twenty days. Yet his prominence has drawn sustained criticism. A 2014 criminal complaint alleged irregularities in natural-gas pricing from the KG basin, and broader accusations have ranged from market manipulation and cronyism to exploitation. More recently, Reliance has faced scrutiny for maintaining trade ties with Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine; India's Russian oil imports surged from three percent in 2021 to forty-two percent in 2025, with Reliance as the largest buyer. On the philanthropy side, Hurun Research ranked him fifth among India's top donors as of 2015.