He’s Indian by upbringing and he’s not a banker by trade. Not your typical fat cat, then. Well, he does reside in London and is a director of Goldman Sachs, the biggest Wall Street beast. But his enormous if wildly fluctuating personal fortune – $29 billion at the last count (up from $19 billion in 2009, but down from $35 billion in 2008) – comes largely from something as quaint as steel. Mittal’s extraordinary career shows how fat cats can prosper equally well from the more mundane operations of corporate globalization.
Legend has it that in 1952 Mittal began his life sleeping on rope furniture, a ‘son of the desert’ in Rajastan. His father moved to Kolkata and made enough money as a partner in a steel firm to send Lakshmi – named after the Hindu goddess of wealth – to the prestigious St Xavier’s College, where he was good at accounts. He then worked for his father who, in 1976, bought a failing steel mill in Indonesia and sent Lakshmi to turn it around. This he duly did, before moving on in 1989 to do the same in Trinidad, then Mexico, and finally – after numerous disputes – taking complete control of the family’s international arm.
