"Bored" or Rewriting the Playbook? A Rebuttal to the West’s Sneering Gaze at India’s Legacy Billionaire Gen Z

Bloomberg's Andy Mukherjee’s latest opinion piece — sniggering at India’s legacy billionaire Gen Z for supposedly being “bored” of their family businesses — is hardly an outlier. It’s part of a long tradition in Western financial journalism that looks at Indian wealth with a potent mix of discomfort, disapproval, and condescension. This time, though, the criticism is not just ill-founded — it’s tone-deaf to the massive opportunity this generation represents.

Let’s take this piece apart.


One Family ≠ All of India’s Business Dynasties

Mukherjee builds his entire thesis on the Piramals winding down their legacy luggage business. But the Piramals are not a one-business family — and that luggage brand was far from the family’s economic center of gravity. In fact, they've pivoted toward high-value sectors like pharmaceuticals and financial services.

To generalise this as a “pattern” of disinterest across India’s business scions is absurd.


Most Legacy Next-Gen Heirs Aren’t Losing Interest

The idea that India’s business heirs are bored or disengaged is factually wrong. Just look around:

  • Parth Jindal is pushing JSW into EVs, sports, and global expansion.
  • Ameera Shah has turned Metropolis Healthcare into a nation-wide diagnostics powerhouse.
  • Suneeta & Sangita Reddy continue to lead Apollo’s evolution into digital health.
  • Srinivasan Venu is driving the TVS Group’s electric mobility strategy.
  • Adani scions are deeply involved in the group’s infra-tech diversification.

Far from retreating, these leaders are expanding the very definition of what their family businesses can become.


What If Some Do Shift Tracks? That’s Not Dereliction — It’s Deployment

Even if a few heirs aren’t keen on running their legacy businesses, so what? Nearly 50% of top MBA graduates globally enter finance and investment. If India’s billionaire Gen Z uses their Western MBAs not to run old empires but to invest in new ones — that’s not laziness, that’s leverage.

In fact, if they choose to become long-horizon startup investors, they might be doing more to future-proof India’s economy than if they simply sit on boardroom thrones.


India’s Startup Ecosystem Doesn’t Need Just Capital — It Needs Patient, Strategic Capital

Yes, India is now the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. But while it has no dearth of Series A venture capital, it still lacks billion-dollar DeepTech funds with the risk appetite for AI, semiconductors, space-tech, advanced mobility, and climate innovation.

This is where family offices — unburdened by quarterly returns and driven by generational thinking — can change the game. Gen Z heirs can become the nation’s most creative venture capitalists, catalyzing next-gen sectors where even state-backed funding may hesitate.

Moreover, Indian startups — especially in DeepTech — suffer from a structural funding handicap: India’s artificially low sovereign credit ratings. Despite being the fastest-growing major economy, India continues to carry a near-junk rating from the Big Three rating agencies (something that Bloomberg and other Western media conveniently fail to critique). This inflates the cost of foreign capital, particularly for venture debt or R&D-intensive sectors. In this context, the entry of legacy Gen Z billionaires as domestic long-term investors isn't indulgent — it’s imperative. They can bypass these global distortions and allocate capital based on conviction, not credit ratings.


What’s Really Going On Here: An Insecure Western Gaze

Mukherjee’s sneer isn’t new. Western media has long had trouble with Indian business families — judging them as feudal, dynastic, opaque, or unmeritocratic. The discomfort becomes sharper when Indian heirs are unapologetically wealthy, Western-educated, and unburdened by colonial inferiority.

That may explain why his piece includes a gratuitous mention of Radhika Piramal’s sexuality — a detail utterly irrelevant to his central argument, but conveniently tabloid-ish (and cheap) enough.


Conclusion: Stop Writing Off a Generation That’s Only Just Beginning

India’s billionaire Gen Z are not bored. They’re broadening the canvas. Some will transform legacy businesses. Others will seed the DeepTech revolution. A few will do both. But none of them deserve to be ridiculed for seeking purpose beyond inheritance.

What India needs now is not more second-hand cynicism from retired foreign correspondents, but a bet — on the creativity, capital, and conviction of a generation willing to invest in India’s hardest problems.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wipro’s Great Squander — From India’s First Computer-Maker to a Service-Provider at Risk of Irrelevance

The recent Infosys share buyback has reignited debates around Indian IT’s long-term strategy. While buybacks boost valuations temporarily, critics have rightly contrasted Indian IT majors with their Western counterparts. Companies like Oracle, Microsoft, or Salesforce use financial engineering alongside innovation, whereas Indian IT often leans on financial maneuvers in place of sustained innovation. BusinessLine, among others, has highlighted this growing gap — and the criticism was overdue. But to understand what’s at stake, we need to go back to the history of one of India’s IT bellwethers — Wipro. Unlike Infosys, Wipro was not always a services-only company. It has a product-building DNA that it has all but abandoned. Wipro’s Legacy of Product-Building Wipro was an Indian pioneer in personal computing. In the 1980s, it made one of India’s earliest PCs, well before mass-market computing became common. In the 2000s and 2010s, Wipro used to make desktop and laptop PCs. Beyond IT serv...
Read more

AI Context-Adding: The Next Leap in Social Media Credibility

Social media has given us unprecedented access to news and ideas — but also unprecedented exposure to mis- and disinformation. While platforms have tried various solutions, few have achieved the right balance between speed, credibility, inclusivity, and neutrality. One of the more promising ideas in recent years is X’s Community Notes — a crowdsourced way to add user-generated context to posts. But as it stands, the system is still largely unmoderated, inconsistent, and prone to both bias and misuse. I believe the idea can be greatly enhanced by blending democratic user participation with the speed and scale of AI. Not to fact-check in an aggressive, “true/false” sense, but to add benign, nuanced context that enriches understanding and reduces online polarization. The Model I Propose  1. Open Participation – The system should be open to all users, or at least low-barrier paying users. 2. Evidence-Based Flagging – Users can flag a post they believe lacks context or misrepresents eve...
Read more