Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani (Hindi: धीरजलाल हीराचंद अंबानी; 28 December 1932 – 6 July 2002) was an Indian industrialist who founded Reliance Industries, a petrochemicals, communications, power, and textiles conglomerate and one of the 3 privately owned Indian companies in the Fortune 500. Ambani took his company public in 1977. Dhirubhai has been among the select few to be figured in the Sunday Times list of top 50 businessmen in Asia. His life has often been referred to as a true "rags to riches" story.
Dhirubhai started off as a small time worker with Arab merchants in the 1950s and moved to Mumbai in 1958 to start his own business in spices. After making modest profits, he moved into textiles and opened his mill near Ahmedabad. He founded Reliance Industries in 1966, and today, the company, with over 85,000 employees, provides almost 5% of the Central Government's total tax revenue. Ambani was credited with introducing the stock market to the average Indian investor, and thousands of investors attended the Reliance annual general meetings, which were sometimes held in a football stadium, with millions more watching on television.[citation needed]
Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani (Gujarati: મુકેશ ધીરુભાઈ અંબાની) (born on 19 April 1957) is an Indian business magnate who is the chairman and managing director of the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), the foremost company of the Indian energy and materials conglomerate Reliance Group. The company was ranked #134th in Fortune Global 500 and is India's most valuable company by market value and second-largest Indian company by turnover. Ambani remains the largest individual shareholder, with 44.7 percent stake in RIL. The company is the operator of the world’s biggest oil refining complex and owner of India’s biggest natural gas field. Mukesh's younger brother is Anil Ambani, who heads Reliance Group. The Ambani family is the richest family in India and one of the richest in the world, their wealth inherited from Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of 2nd largest Indian conglomerate Reliance Group (after Tata Group).
In 2010, he was named among the most powerful people in the world by Forbes in its list of "68 people who matter most" As of 2012, he is the second richest man in Asia and the 19th richest person in the world with a personal wealth of US$22.3 billion. In 2007, a strong rally in the Indian stock market and the appreciation of the Indian rupee boosted the market capitalisation of Reliance group companies, briefly making him the world’s richest man.