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Biography
Rakesh Mittal is a non-executive director of Bharti Airtel, one of India's largest mobile phone operators. It has more than 600 million customers across South Asia and Africa.
Airtel, which has SingTel as its partner, competes with Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio and Kumar Birla's Vodafone Idea.
In 2022, Google announced a $1 billion investment in Bharti Airtel,of which $700 million was for a minority stake in the company.
In March 2024, Indian-American billionaire investor Rajiv Jain's GQG Partners bought a $713 million stake in Bharti Airtel from SingTel.
Their Bharti Global, run by his nephew Shravin, has stakes in France's Eutelsat and U.K. telecoms company BT.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Rakesh Mittal
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Rakesh Mittal, linked to Telecom and 'Telecom', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 65 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 4.1 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.