As son of Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, prepares to marry, global elites travel to India

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have in common? The three of them are set to attend the same wedding in India, along with plenty of other prestigious guests. 

On Friday, the great and the good and a few thousand others are expected to descend on a 25-acre Mumbai convention center owned by Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in Asia. There, he’ll throw a wedding that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and has prompted police in the city of more than 20 million to reroute traffic around the venue.

So lavish is the wedding party — or series of wedding parties — that the Reliance Industries chairman is hosting for his son Anant Ambani and his fiancée, Radhika Merchant, both 29, that it’s technically been going on for a week and a half. 

But pre-wedding events began in March, with a Bollywood-star-studded party at which 500 dishes were served, 1,200 guests were invited and Rihanna gave only her second performance in six years. 

The nuptials of Anant Ambani and Merchant — the daughter of pharmaceutical tycoon Viren Merchant — have come to symbolize the Ambani family’s power and wealth and India’s growing global clout. 

The groom’s father, 67, is the world’s ninth richest man and will be putting a small sliver of his vast wealth — widely reported to be in excess of $100 billion — to work. 

The empire that Ambani and his siblings took over from their father, Dhirubhai Ambani, has operations in energy, petrochemicals, retail, telecommunications and textiles, among other industries. Ambani has already begun passing the torch to his children. Anant Ambani, 29, is a graduate of Brown University and is overseeing the conglomerate’s green energy expansion. 

Critics say the company flourished due to its political connections with the Congress government in the ’70s and ’80s and then with Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he took office in 2014, accusations both deny. 

Some have criticized such a conspicuous display of wealth amid worsening income inequality in India, where almost half the population lives on less than $3.60 — the poverty line defined by the World Bank. And the gap between the rich and the poor is so high it breaks all historical precedents, even under British colonial rule between 1858 and 1947, according to a March report by the World Inequality Lab.

Shahid Siddiqui, a former member of India’s upper house of Parliament called it the “most vulgar and ostentatious marriage ever seen,” in a post on X on Sunday. 

Thomas Isaac, a former finance minister of the southern state of Kerala and a member of the Communist Party of India, also took to X to criticize the amount spent on the wedding. “Legally it may be their money but such ostentatious expenditure is a sin,” he wrote Thursday. 

An average Indian wedding can cost $33,000, with festivities lasting for days with a number of rituals and performances, according to a 2023 survey by the wedding-planning website WeddingWire.

The Ambanis — whose 27-story mansion is just 7 miles away from the Dharavi slum, depicted in the 2008 Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” where around 1 million people live in less than a square mile — are going above and beyond convention to say the least. 

Bhavnesh Sawhney, a Mumbai-based wedding planner who has organized some of Bollywood’s biggest weddings, told NBC News He estimated the nuptials could cost up to $600 million when accounting for pre-wedding parties, entertainment, catering and the bill for 5,000 wedding vendor employees.

“It’s the craziest richest wedding ever,” he said. “I don’t think any wedding in the world or anyone has spent this kind of money in terms of expenses, magnitude, events, entertainment, decor or design.”

The Ambanis have developed something of a reputation over the years for throwing extravagant weddings. In 2018, when Mukesh Ambani’s daughter, Isha Ambani, 32, got married, Beyoncé performed at pre-wedding festivities and the guest list included former U.S. Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

This time around, the celebrations have been even more grandiose. Last week, Canadian singer Justin Bieber sang at one of the couple’s many pre-wedding parties in Mumbai. That came after a four-day pre-wedding Mediterranean cruise that drew Katy Perry, the Backstreet Boys and the Bollywood legend Shah Rukh Khan.

One pre-wedding get-together in March had a guestlist of 1,200 that included Ivanka Trump, Bill Gates and Google’s parent company, Alphabet’s CEO, Sundar Pichai. 

The networking and business opportunities from hosting such an event will not be lost on the man footing the bill. The party was held at the family hometown in the western state of Gujarat. 

A nearby military airfield had to be upgraded and granted temporary international status to handle the incoming fleet of private jets. 

“Planning for this would have taken two years,” Sawhney said. “But when you have all the resources available to you, it’s not difficult.”