Isha, Akash Ambani debut on Fortune's '40 Under 40' influencer list

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's twin children Isha and Akash have debuted on Fortune's '40 Under 40' list of influential people around the globe.

Fortune featured the names of Isha and Akash Ambani, scions of the oil-to-telecom conglomerate, under the technology list. "They say data is the new oil—and when it comes to Reliance Industries, India's largest company, that's literally the case," Fortune said, adding the 47-year-old conglomerate amassed a fortune in petrochemicals before dominating India’s mobile connectivity market with Jio, a low-cost wireless carrier which debuted in 2016.

"Reliance is a family business. Akash joined the company in 2014 after receiving an economics degree from Brown University. Isha joined a year later, following stints at Yale, Stanford and McKinsey," said Fortune announcing the names of the Ambani scions who play important roles in Reliance group companies.

"As Jio board members, they helped seal the company's recent megadeal with Facebook—$5.7 billion for a 9.99 percent stake—plus major follow-on investments from marquee tech titans like Google, Qualcomm, and Intel. The flurry of investments lent the business an eye-popping USD 65 billion private valuation," Fortune said.

This year's Fortune list includes 40 influential people under 40 years of age in five categories—finance, technology, healthcare, government and politics, and media and entertainment. The other Indian who featured in the technology list is editech startup Byju’s founder Byju Raveendran.

The Ambani scions, it said, lead enviable lives, "attending private concerts featuring Beyonce, partying with buddies Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas, living it up in a 27-story residential skyscraping pleasure palace in Mumbai."

"When the glam siblings are not basking in unfathomable luxury, they're training -- along with their younger brother, Anant, 25, a more recent addition to Jio’s board -- to take on their father's empire. A major proving ground will be e-commerce," it said.

Recently, Akash and Isha helped launch JioMart, a venture that aims to challenge Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart for command of India's massive and fast-growing online shopping market.

This year's list includes 40 influential people under 40 years of age in five categories namely finance, technology, healthcare, government and politics, and media and entertainment.

"To reflect this wave of transformation, we decided that we needed to embrace change in this year's 40 Under 40. We needed to go bigger -- and search more widely," the report said.

The Fortune list also features Manu Kumar Jain, managing director of Xiaomi India.

Regarding Raveendran, Fortune said he has shown the world that it really is possible to build a massively successful online education company. "Byju's, as the company is known, has become India's biggest education technology company, helping millions of students prep and study for the most important exams of their lives while teaching them a thing or two about core topics like mathematics and science," it said.

Disclaimer: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd which publishes Moneycontrol.