India's billionaires: Celebrating wealth as a by-product of innovation, creativity
Many of the Indian billionaires who made it to the list—166, totally—have grown their wealth by building assets and providing services that benefit consumers and investors
It is a perpetual paradox that while some of the most popular—and expensive—footballers are celebrated, the teams they represent are often scorned for the billions they pour into acquiring the cream of the talent.
So, if a Kylian Mbappe, or a Jack Grealish or a Romelu Lukaku is venerated for their goal-scoring prowess, the moneybag owners of the clubs that bought them—Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Chelsea, in that order—invariably risk being perceived as tycoons who care less for the beautiful game and more for the prestige and glamour that come along with ownership. (Few billionaire owners buy a club for a return on investment; that comes from more lucrative core pursuits like oil and metals.) The argument against so much money sloshing around on the football pitch is that it widens the gap between the smaller clubs (who sooner than later lose their best players to the bigger ones) and there’s little left to deploy at the grassroots.
Extend that metaphor beyond football’s bankrollers to the entire world’s billionaires club, and it’s a similar story—of disproportionate wealth at the top of the pyramid. And if Cristiano Ronaldo is venerated as a record-breaking and durable goal-scoring machine, so is an Elon Musk for disrupting automobiles and, audaciously, attempting to buy Twitter for the Utopian ambition of an “uncontrolled” internet.
Musk has as many fans as he has detractors; the latter have been growing as the Tesla and SpaceX founder persists in giving the feeling that the world’s richest man is above the law. If you have a gaggle of such billionaires displaying their clout, it only reinforces a negative image about these gazillionaires.
A recent research study by Ohio State University and Cornell University involving 2,800 participants across eight experiments suggests that while a Musk or a Jeff Bezos or a Warren Buffett may be admired for individual exploits, they aren’t quite adored when considered collectively.
(This story appears in the 06 May, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
