Sept. 12: In a series of serious and semi-serious predictions about the coming decade, US magazine Forbes has forecast that Indian businessman Mr Mukesh Ambani will be the richest man in the world by 2014. “One of the predictions is that Reliance Industries’ chairman and the managing director Mr Ambani, who currently has a net worth of $29 billion, pips the world’s richest man Mexican businessman Mr Carlos Slim to top Forbes’ rich list in 2014,” it said.
The magazine has also made some other forecasts, such as the death of North Korea’s strongman Kim Jong Il at the age of 70 years in 2011. Bernie Madoff, who oversaw the largest ever Ponzi scheme – is also ‘predicted’ to be found dead in his cell in the same year.
The magazine has termed the exercise as “A vision of the coming decade sketched from real data, projections and facts whenever possible — though we have injected a dose of rigorous science fiction to fill the gaps.”