Asia's Richest Billionaires

According to the Forbes World's Billionaires List, Indian moguls Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani are the richest and fourth-richest people in Asia. The top 8 list is otherwise dominated by Chinese tycoons and tech entrepreneurs. With Softbank's Masayoshi Son joining Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai, the 2026 list also has two Japanese entries.

Mukesh Ambani (68) has a net worth of $99.7 billion, only missing the club of those owning $100 billion or more by a hair. Ambani, whose wealth has fluctuated in an out of that bracket since 2021, is the chairman of Reliance Industries Limited, a conglomerate that focuses not only on petrochemicals, but also textiles and telecommunications. He ranks 21st on Forbes' worldwide list, which is headed by Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X formerly Twitter) with $839 billion, Larry Page (Google) with $257 billion and Sergey Brin (Google) with $237 billion.

Gautam Adani (63) is the chairperson of the Adani Group, a conglomerate that deals with businesses exporting and importing raw materials and finished goods, including coal trading, mining, oil and gas exploration, as well as ports, energy and agricultural commodities.

In second position comes Zhang Yiming (41) of ByteDance, the Chinese owner of popular apps TikTok and Douyin, who has a fortune of $69.3 billion. Third is Zhong Shanshan (71) with a net worth of $68.1 billion. He is the founder of beverages company Nongfu Spring as well as of Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise, a private Chinese company and major supplier of Covid-19 testing kits.