Some thought the elder Ambani a relic from an earlier era, and predicted his decline, as happened to America’s Gilded Age tycoons before him. Yet Ambani seemed determined to fight this very possibility, from the Pharaonic scale of his investments to the over-the-top grandeur of his family home. No one embodied so clearly the power of India’s new super-rich. And looking down from Antilia’s roof terrace – his own ‘pinnacle of moneyed magnificence’ – no one else could grasp quite how far there was to fall.
