Editor’s Notes: In this exclusive CNBC-TV18 interview, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink discuss their landmark partnership, JioBlackRock, and its mission to transform India’s financial landscape. Fink declares this the “era of India,” emphasizing the country’s unique position to leapfrog developed economies through rapid digitization and infrastructure growth. The two leaders explore the revolutionary potential of AI to democratize education and healthcare across the nation while tackling global challenges like economic deficits. Ambani highlights a generational shift in mindset, encouraging young Indians to transition from traditional saving to active investing to participate directly in the nation’s wealth creation. (Feb 4, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
The Era of India: A New Investment Paradigm
SHEREEN BHAN: The Chairman of Reliance Industries, Mr. Mukesh Ambani, and the Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, to please join us on stage. Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for the two leaders who join me in a conversation on what it will take to invest in a new era, the trends that will shape our investment choices.
MUKESH AMBANI: Hey, Shereen, how are you? Good to see you.
SHEREEN BHAN: Good to see you. I think they want a picture so we can put the two of you here. Thank you, Mr. Ambani, Larry Fink, thank you very much and welcome to a warm, sultry Mumbai from a very cold Davos, Larry Fink, where you were in the throes of conversation with world leaders about the world order or the world disorder.
So let’s get started with that. We’re talking about investing in a new era. What are the changes that you foresee that will shape the investment choices, the investment decisions of leaders like you as we look at this new era?
Long-Term Vision Over Short-Term Volatility
LARRY FINK: Well, first of all, it’s great to be here in Mumbai. It’s great to spend time with my partner Mukesh and the entire Reliance team. So it’s a real honor to be here. Weather is nicer here than it is in Davos and much nicer than New York, where I had our board meeting last week. So it’s good to be here.
You know, we talk about a new era to give people a foundational understanding of where we are. But as an investor, I don’t look at any era. I mean, our job is to have people focus on the real opportunities to invest over a lifetime. There’s so much information that confuses people. Media talks about the moment, the velocity of money.
And the reality is for most people, they need to be in a position to grow with each other, with each and everyone’s country. So when you think about the growth of India, it’s not a quarter, it’s not a day or week, it’s not a year. It’s over a long horizon. And you could say maybe this is the era for India over the next 20, 25 years.
But if you use that as a foundational paradigm that we all want to think about—the era of India—forget about the era of investing for a second, but the era of India. The key for us, the key for Jio BlackRock, is to compel more people to understand: What does that mean, the era of India, and how do you participate in it?
Democratizing Investment in India’s Growth
What we’ve learned in the United States is that for that segment of the population that invested with the growth of America, they’re far better off than those who just kept all their money in a bank account. And so the key is, if you believe in the era of India—forget about the era of investing—the era of India, which I believe in, we need to get more people investing alongside the growth of the country. And that’s the role of the capital markets. That’s the role of what we can be doing together.
And to me, whether you want to focus on era, you want to focus on how we live, how we grow, how we educate ourselves, to me, those are subsets of the era of India and the opportunity to be an investor alongside the growth of India. And to me, that’s a compelling story.
It’s not about tariffs or President Trump or anything else that’s top of mind. We need to be compelling people to think about the horizon of investing over a long period of time to grow with the great companies of India, to be a part of that and to participate in that.
And I’m absolutely convinced, if you believe in that, the era of India, we need to compel hundreds of millions of Indians to invest alongside the growth of India. And that will actually transform India in so many ways. Because as more and more families invest alongside the growth of India, India has less need for the importation of capital.
And I do believe the combination of importation of capital from foreign investors who believe in the era of India, but the fundamental foundation of any country is having the domestic economy being built on the back of retirement savings, on the back of excess savings to invest alongside of that.
SHEREEN BHAN: Well, thank you very much for those opening remarks. And you know, “the era of India,” says Larry Fink—that is certainly going to be one of the headlines that goes out this evening.
But if I could ask you to explain to us what excites you the most about India. You referenced the tariffs and we’ve had a deal with the US overnight. President Trump and Prime Minister Modi have signed off on that reciprocal tariff agreement. So the overhang has lifted, at least on one aspect of that relationship. How crucial a development is that? And what excites you the most about India today?
India’s Digital Leapfrog and Technology Leadership
LARRY FINK: Well, let’s be clear, over 20 years, it had no bearing.
But the beginning of the smartphone, the rollout of 5G and how that transformed India in so many ways. When you think about how the Modi administration digitized the rupee and how it transformed commerce in India across the board, I am very worried about other countries. Even the United States is falling behind. We need to be digitized. We need to be thinking about how this all plays out.
I think this is part of the democratization of India and it’s—and so now India is a leader in this. And so I can cite many things that give me optimism. But the fundamental opportunity is the huge intellectualism of India that transformed what technology—whether the technology was created in the US or somewhere else in the world—the dispersion of that technology in India is really what is so inspiring.
And the utilization of the new technology for more and more people and how that transforms commerce, consumption, information, education, all of that is ripe for real, solid growth. And I agree that India has, over the next 10 plus years, it’s going to grow anywhere from 8 to 12%, probably hovering around 8 to 10%. And that’s a place where I want to personally invest in. And what we need to do is compel more Indians to invest alongside that growth.
SHEREEN BHAN: Well, we certainly hope that more Indians are going to be investing in that story as well. And speaking of one such Indian, Mr. Ambani, let me talk to you about Larry Fink’s praise of saying that this is the era of India.
Now, you’ve seen India over the last two decades transform itself in many, many ways, especially as far as the digitization era is concerned. Specifically, what excites you, what is compelling about the India story today? How have you seen it being transformed?
The Tree Bearing Fruit: India’s Economic Transformation
MUKESH AMBANI: Well, Shereen, before I answer that, let me warmly welcome Larry and I’m grateful to Larry to again come back to India. It was a conversation that we had in 2023 and it just took him, took me five minutes to say, “Larry, BlackRock should be back in India.”
SHEREEN BHAN: And he said, that’s all it took, five minutes?
LARRY FINK: Will you partner me? We had to go to point A and point B and we accomplished it in a car ride.
MUKESH AMBANI: And here you are with your full team and we have launched the business. So thank you for again coming back to India. And India warmly welcomes you and your colleagues and to all my colleagues from the industry and the financial community, a very warm welcome. And we look forward to working with each and every one of you.
As Shereen said, I think that, you know, Larry, there is an old Indian saying that a tree only attracts attention if it bears fruit. And today in this new era, as you described it, India and the tree of the Indian economy is bearing fruit with great visibility, with sustainability and abundance.
As everybody said, we are confident—we are the largest, fastest-growing economy in the world. 8 to 10% is possible and doable. And I think that sustained double digit is not ruled out. So that gives us the—and that is why we are after a long time attracting all this attention.
Stable Leadership and Clear Vision
And this has happened primarily because I think that the last 10, 15 years, we had two successive periods. We had 10 years of Manmohan Singh where we focused on growth. And then we were very lucky to have now consistently 15 years of very stable leadership. So stable economic leadership defines a country. And I think that we have to be thankful to Prime Minister Modi for giving us this stability now. By 2029 it will be 15 years.
I also think that we’ve got a very—what is different about this is we’ve got a very clear goal. A goal in terms of saying we have to be developed—Viksit Bharat by 2047—which every Indian aspires to and has started believing in.
Second, we’ve executed at scale. While as Indians we like to criticize ourselves—and it’s a good thing in a democratic mindset—but if you see, we built more roads in the last 15 years than any other country, multiple times more than any other country including the United States at its peak.
We’ve built power capacities. We are now the leading renewable power producer in the world. We’ve built in our own industry, digital capacities, 5G that is better than most people in the world and cheaper than most people in the world. And now every Indian village has got 5G.
Infrastructure and Policy Continuity
So I can go on—we built the same thing in terms of infrastructure. The roads that you see in Mumbai. For a long time we said that we will connect Mumbai to the mainland and we now have the bridge that is running. So we’ve executed, we’ve also had policy which is sustainable.
So even when you see between governments, we all thought that Aadhaar was the earlier government’s initiative. I think this government was wise enough to say we’ve had continuity in policy at all times. We’ve had stability, we’ve had predictability. We’ve also been conservative.
So as Indian successive finance ministers, we’ve always maintained our debt in order relative to global debt. We are still 50% of GDP as debt. So we are not like the world norm which is now 100%. So we’ve had—and I think that we’ve also in the private sector, and what excites me the most is the startup industry.
The New Generation of Indian Entrepreneurs
When I interact with startups and we see young 28, 30-year-olds starting up companies, I can clearly see 100 new Reliances in terms of where—and the aspiration, the confidence that they have.
And finally it is the confidence that you see. Fortunately we now operate across the length and breadth of India. So it’s not only the confidence in forums like this, but when you see the confidence in young people going to school and colleges, and in parents today believing that their tomorrow is better than today.
And that is a big, big change in India that all of us—this is our baby boomer generation, this is the Indian generation that believes that they’ll make a better tomorrow than today. And that’s the confidence that we see as a result of all of this.
And I don’t want to rule out—when everybody—we’ve also had at least I think a sustained 15, 20 years of great law and order. And that is a prerequisite to continuous economic growth, social harmony. All of these things matter and hopefully we are now setting the foundation for many, many decades. The world sees that.
Global Interest in India’s Growth Story
And that is why, you know, even after the budget we had, the European treaty, we had fortunately the US—so the world is looking at us. We at Reliance get at least every month three or four global majors. We cannot say yes to everybody for partnerships in terms of saying we want to come to India and can we work together.
So the world is taking notice of India. It’s a tree laden with abundant fruit. And I have always believed that for profit and for prosperity, nobody needs an invitation. And that is why we are attracting all the people. And I think this is very, very sustainable over the coming decades.
SHEREEN BHAN: Sustainable for the coming decades and 100 more Reliances in your words from the startup ecosystem. If that comes true and that bears fruit, it’ll be a very, very different economy as you point out, Mr. Ambani.
But you know, I just want to understand from you since we’re talking about Jio BlackRock, we’re talking about the opportunity for India’s financial sector, a lot of people are asking: is the ambition and the aspiration to disrupt this business just as you did with telecom, Mr. Ambani?
The Philosophy Behind JioBlackRock
MUKESH AMBANI:
Well, our ambition and aspiration starts with, you know, what I admire about Larry. And Larry is not only the result-oriented CEO of a top global multinational, right, but I think that he has a very compassionate and passionate heart. When he told me that, “Look, at the end of the day, the purpose of BlackRock is not to just make short-term results or not even to make returns for my investors and my shareholders. If I cannot put this money to work first for the betterment of society, and as a byproduct I give my investors and shareholders returns, then I would have done my job.” And that is the Reliance philosophy too.
We’ve always believed that our minds match and the purpose of JioBlackRock. And I think that disruption is fashionable. But the opportunity that we see is that Indians have really been savers, right? From, if you look at our history, we have saved consistently over the last five, six decades. What has happened is that some of this saving has not been productive.
If you see just the last year, we as India imported $60 billion worth of gold and we imported $10 to $15 billion worth of silver. And all of this not for industrial use but really for domestic savings. Now, this is unproductive. If we can actually convince the Indian saver that if one invests in the capital markets in a safe, transparent and consistent way, there are returns. And these returns, we heard from all the three panelists, compound.
And for us at JioBlackRock, the opportunity is to encourage Indians to save, but to make sure that we give them the options to convert those savings into earnings and hopefully compound their earnings so that they not only work for themselves but they also work for the Indian economy. And that propels the Indian economy to grow in terms of what we want to do, and then we all grow together. So yes, if you call that disruption, we will use technology distribution to achieve that for every Indian, for every Indian household, for every Indian small business and large businesses. That’s our objective.
Client-Centric Growth Philosophy
LARRY FINK:
So from the foundation and the beginnings of BlackRock, we never focused on targets of growth, ever. And yet our focus has been relentlessly on the client. Whether it’s a client who’s awarding us 100 rupees or a sovereign wealth fund who is awarding us tens of billions of dollars, if you are working on behalf of each and every client and you’re serving that client over a long horizon with good advice, with maybe a degree of safety and importantly just confidence building about the opportunities of compounding over a long period of time through the utilization of technology, to intersect more often, more frequently, to have deeper, broader relations with your clients, that’s how disruption occurs.
But disruption does not occur because you set a target. The target is making sure you’re living with purpose every day with each and every client. And if you can achieve that with consistency day after day, clients will reward you with more share of their wallet. And so to me it’s just a process. It’s a process you have to earn every day, live every day. And if you do that properly and you’re embedding that in the culture of the firm, we could be disruptive. But you can’t be otherwise.
SHEREEN BHAN:
Yes, we can’t be otherwise. You need to have the alignment of values and then of course everything else builds on top of that. Mr. Ambani, let me come back to you on the investing in India’s growth opportunity and this new era that we’re speaking about and the role of making strategic choices today which will require patient capital. And I want to understand from your perspective what it will take actually to build patiently with patient capital over the next two decades.
India’s Long-Term Growth Trajectory
MUKESH AMBANI:
Well, I think that the Indian opportunity, as we stand, we stand at about $4, $4.5 trillion of GDP in a $110 trillion world. I see us outgrowing the world and finding the right place. So I am one of those believers who think that this $4.5 trillion in a 23 to 30-year period will outgrow the rest of the world and we will hit $25 to $30 trillion. It’s going to be 30 years from now. But as we do that, the India opportunity is a 10, 20, 30-year opportunity.
And when you think about solving India’s energy problems, I am a believer that in the next decade India will not import 80% of its energy. We have a path and God willing, with technological breakthroughs, we will be reasonably self-sufficient in energy. Investments in such energy sectors which make us self-sufficient are 20, 30-year time horizon investments.
In physical infrastructure that we still need, we have the opportunity to build with today’s technology the physical infrastructure for 1.4 billion people. We’ve done a lot, but there’s a lot more to do. These are also 20, 30-year opportunities.
Technological infrastructure: we are not going to be behind the world in terms of building country-scale intelligence infrastructure so that every village has intelligence available to them. And this also is a 20, 30-year opportunity. Each one of this is hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. And within that, while the benefits are there, long-term sustainable compoundable opportunities.
And that requires sustainable capital which comes both from within and outside. And to my mind, India is attracting, we ourselves, our own experience in most of our industries is that it is not capital which is a problem, it is opportunities and execution, right? And the ability to give an overall transparent framework to both the consumers and the investors, which is the opportunity. It’s not going to be limited by patient capital. The world recognizes that India, because the world also doesn’t have many such scale opportunities where they can deploy on a few projects hundreds of billions of dollars.
SHEREEN BHAN:
Absolutely. The market of course in India presents a very compelling opportunity across different sectors, as you spoke of. But Larry Fink, let’s talk about AI and the power, the potential of AI. And you’re a big believer in the story, not just for BlackRock but in general, you know, the stock market volatility notwithstanding the fact that we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars in this infrastructure build-out. And this is sort of front-loaded spending and there’s a question mark still on the revenues and the returns. How do you sum up what is happening in the world of AI today? What do you look for? What do you look at?
The AI Revolution: Opportunity, Not Bubble
LARRY FINK:
I would first state that I don’t believe there’s an AI bubble.
SHEREEN BHAN:
You don’t believe that?
LARRY FINK:
Not at all. I believe the greatest risk we have is if we don’t invest and continue to invest, China will win. And I believe the need to rapidly expand the AI opportunities is necessary. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to have some bankruptcies. We’ll have some failures. That’s capitalism: to have some big successes and big failures.
But the opportunity that companies have in utilizing AI is going to be present in everything we do. I mean, even yesterday you had Anthropic announce a new model which is going to be threatening for some businesses, but it’s going to be an opportunity for other businesses. You mentioned Davos and you mentioned the word cloud. There’s no question AI is among the most topical conversations we’re having now because it is disruptive. It’s going to be disruptive for some industries, but it’s going to also be very advancing.
I mean, the future of AI in terms of drug discovery, in terms of humanity, is real. The use of AI for the development of new sources of power or cheaper sources of power, what can that mean in the long run for the global south? Could we have abundance in energy one day? Now, that’s still pretty far-fetched at this moment, but the opportunities of the acceleration of science is there.
Rob Goldstein talked about having the ability to use AI to learn everything about one subject in minutes now. And so AI is going to allow more discovery, more opportunities. And with that technology, like so many other technologies, it’s going to be disruptive for some businesses in some economies. And the key for AI to be really successful in every society, we need to make sure that AI broadens economic success and it doesn’t narrow economic success. We talked about that a lot in Davos the last two weeks. And that’s going to be the real issue. Can AI be not only disruptive, but can it be expanding and broadening economic success throughout all economies?
And that’s going to be the big question about how do we play that out. In the early part of AI, you’re going to see countries that are huge winners and some countries that are going to be left behind. And so you have all this dynamism around how AI is going to be playing out. In the short, the long run, I think it’s going to be more democratizing, but in the first few parts of AI, it’s going to be more limiting.
AI as a Transformative Force
And so we look at AI as a huge opportunity for us navigating our $2 trillion that we manage on behalf of our clients. We have to use advanced technologies to process the business that we are already doing, and the same thing for all the other major companies. Through AI, you have better understanding of your clients, better understanding of your inventory controls. You have so many advantages by the application of AI and technology, and that is in the long run going to be very powerful.
In so many of the developed economies we have excessive deficits. It’s a conversation that was not talked about in Davos, about the excessive deficits, which is a substantial problem for many of the developed economies, including the United States. Can AI increase productivity? And if so, can we increase GDP with a diminishing population? That’s going to be the question that Korea is going to be asking and Japan’s going to be asking, Italy. Can you have a growing economy? Can you have a broadening of economic success with fewer people, with the utilization of AI and robotics? I believe the answer is going to be profoundly yes.
But it also means countries that have very rapid growing populations, that’s going to be a bigger question. And I think India is at the nexus of a large base population. But the one thing that I’ve noticed, India is more accepting of technologies than many of the developed countries. India is more accepting related to change than most developed economies.
And so because of the large-scale population, AI is going to create jobs and disrupt jobs. But for those economies that are willing to accept change and rapidly deploy that change in a positive way, and I think about India, the way it rapidly transformed its economy with the digitization of the rupee, I mean, to me that was a wonder to watch. And so to me, AI is going to be a powerful growth engine in the world, but we need to make sure it’s a growth engine for more.
Leveraging Technology for Shared Prosperity
SHEREEN BHAN:
You’re absolutely right. And you know, to your point about India surprising on the digitization front, this was a surprising fact for me as well. The Binance CEO in Davos telling me that India is the number one adopter of blockchain technology. And that’s something that I was not aware of. But Mr. Ambani, since we’re talking about AI and we’re talking about technology, to Larry Fink’s point, how do we leverage all of this to create shared wealth creation?
# The Era of AI and India’s Technological Advantage
MUKESH AMBANI: Well, I think that I’m a believer, have been a believer that we have to embrace technology. We cannot run away from it. And AI is real, right?
From an India point of view, it is hugely advantageous if we think about 200 million children in our schools and if we now think about connectivity to all our schools and we give ourselves a goal that in one decade, with a fraction of the total GDP that others spend on education, we can deliver to each of these 200 million kids, including in the remotest village, quality education. I think without AI this problem, we could not have dreamt about solving it. And we are also participating in this opportunity. A solvable problem.
You take healthcare and saying India is a large economy, 1.4 billion people, but without any Social Security, without any organized health safety net, right? As yet relative to all the other countries, can we deliver? Everybody, like the large economies spend 8, 10, 12% of their GDP on delivering healthcare to their citizens. Large amount of it is wasted in terms of what and everybody recognizes this. Can we in India take care of all our 1.4 billion people with a digital physical health system at a fraction of global costs? Answer is, cannot do it without AI.
Security. Right? Again, critical for our safety, for all our 1.4 billion people. If you use AI and complement it with your law enforcement policies, possible to do. Simple taxation. We can now have the ability to have for each citizen, each company, the transactional transparency. So your tax paying becomes as simple as when you stay in a hotel and you have an electronic system. You can see all your transactions both ways and there are no disputes and it becomes a much predictable, enforceable society.
Embracing the AI Revolution
So that’s AI and we shouldn’t get scared of AI. It’s exactly like when the industrial revolution came and humanity moved forward. We moved, productivity moved forward. We moved from 0.3% growth for many, many decades or many centuries to 3% growth overall. And at that time, if you go back 200 years and if you ask people that can people travel 2,000 kilometers a day? Not possible. Today, all of us, not two, with flying, we can travel 30,000 kilometers a day. And I think we are just at the beginning of that age.
We must embrace it. India has the opportunity. And what we see, as you said, is we see that young Indians, as Kamath Sahib said, old Indians, right, India just adapts to technology faster than everybody. We’ve seen it firsthand over the last five years in terms of what we want. And we should use that as our competitive advantage. Embrace this. Get the productivity advantage, get the earnings advantage, build a better society in terms of and use tomorrow’s technology before anybody else so that we catch up from our $4,000 or few thousand dollars per capita to double digit per capita and then get to the US is still at $40,000, $50,000 per capita.
So we’ve got a long way to go. This is a path to catch up. And I think the world will allow us to catch up with them in the next two decades. And that’s an opportunity like from my point of view at Reliance, we are taking this opportunity with both hands in terms of that it’s once in tens of centuries opportunity. And we can, like if we embrace technology, if we allow our youth to embrace that, right, then in the next 20, 30 years we can redefine India and find our true position in the world.
Markets, Interest Rates, and Long-Term Thinking
SHEREEN BHAN: A multi-generational opportunity, as you put it, Mr. Ambani. But Mr. Fink, you know, let me address the issue that you brought up and said it didn’t get enough attention in Davos and that was deficit. But what did get a lot of attention in Davos was of course the interest rate trajectory that the world is going to be faced with. And you know how you see some of these factors impacting markets globally, the investment sentiment globally as well. Where do you see interest rates headed? Do you believe that we’re likely to see more cuts coming in and what will be some of the other crucial risks that investors need to watch for?
LARRY FINK: Well, all those questions are for the short term. So let me answer some short term questions. Look at the markets. The markets are honest. I mean any single day the markets may miscalculate something, but over time markets are the, is a great mirror of what’s really going on. So whether there’s political pressure one way or the other, sure, that could shape a market over any one day or week. But markets actually are bigger than any individual or any economy.
And so if the market, if there’s, if the Federal Reserve eases too early and we see inflation, we see measures that prove it wrong, you’re going to have a steepening of the yield curve. So all those issues to me are not that important, to be honest. I know they’re important for day traders, they’re important for media because they could talk about all the churn and all that, but it really doesn’t matter that much. And I don’t really spend that much time focusing on those type of issues. Not any over a course of any one quarter, any one year, yes, sure, they matter. But over time the markets correct itself and rebalance itself.
And that’s pretty much the message that we have to constantly talk about because the message is not about the moment. And everybody gets so confused about the politics, the polarization of opinions, you know, the politicization of everything. And yet over time, that’s the beauty of markets. They, the markets are an honest reflection of global economies over the long run. And that’s, and if you believe in humanity, if you believe that we correct our problems over time.
The Power of Addressing Problems
I actually believe the things you read in the newspaper. All of the stuff we read, that’s frightening. I get actually extremely excited because we’re talking about those issues and generally we mitigate. Most of the things that are on the front pages, we actually mitigate. So I actually am pleased when I see all the things, all these terrible things and I’m not trying to say each and one of those things may be really terrible, but the fact that we’re talking about it mitigates, we self-correct.
Are they the things that you don’t read in the newspaper that you think are a problem? Those are the things that bother me. Like the long-term issues of deficits that we don’t spend enough time talking about. How do we mitigate it? The best way we mitigate it is through growth. That’s what I try to tell every political leader. How do you grow your economy? Because you grow your economy, the deficits will be smaller as a percent of GDP.
But, and so I, you know, I don’t get, I don’t want to, I don’t get bothered by most of the stuff I read because it’s a good thing. That’s the power of the press to identify all the issues. But through that identification of the issues, we mitigate those issues. They, you know, you think about all the problems you read and all the wars and all the skirmishes, but in most cases over time they resolve themselves.
You think about how problematic everything is when we entered this year. And yet over, you know, when you think about the beginning of 2025, everybody was so nervous about everything, yet markets did great over 2025. We have some form of resolution in Gaza and Israel. There are so many other areas in the world where we actually have diminished risks. But if you ask the average person who reads a paper, they would think things are actually worse than they are.
And to me, obviously, negative news sells far better than positive stories. And so what I’m trying to say and my message to everybody is yes, please be a global reader of what’s going on, but don’t get so alarmed by it because we’re going to mitigate most of those problems because that’s what we do as human beings. And that is the whole message about long-term optimism.
The Power of Optimism and Imagination
You know, long-term optimists generally win. You know, Elon Musk said in Davos, “It’s better to be an optimist and being wrong than being a pessimist who’s right.” And I think about just Elon himself for a second. I’ve never met a person who is as smart as he is, but with the imagination that he has and the guts to do what he’s done. And I think in building that out, and I would just liken that to Mukesh Ambani. The ambition, the imagination and those are the key things in growth and opportunity.
And to me, this is what we all want to be about. Part of we want to invest with the people who have ambition, who have the guts to do things that break the mold, that break that, that changes society, but they change society because of imagination and guts. And to me that’s the beauty of being a long-term investor.
SHEREEN BHAN: Absolutely. So being an optimist and getting it wrong versus a pessimist and getting it right. In Elon Musk’s words is more important and you agree with him. But Mr. Ambani, you know, you were talking about the startup ecosystem and I want to understand from you, you know, both of you spoke about changing the mindset from savings to investing and both of you are focused on generating growth. What is the message to the young Indian saver today? What would both of you tell the young Indian savers? And let me start by asking you, Mr. Ambani.
Message to Young Indian Savers: From Saving to Investing
MUKESH AMBANI: Well, Shereen, I think that to my mind the India opportunity is genuinely a new era. It’s now we can see it visibly over the next two or three decades in terms of, and all of us agree that growth and we take growth for granted. But let me tell you, all over the world people would die for 10% year on year growth. And we are growing on a large base and we will sustain that.
So for any young Indian, right, this growth is going to be converted to growth into his or her income. And so you would have income growth. We’ve got to continue our savings mindset. We still want to be conservative. We don’t want to inherit too many deficit problems. We are still okay. So as long as we save and if we make that mental mindset in terms of saying we will go and invest our savings to grow with India back into productive uses, to have these productive uses, Jio BlackRock and the whole financial community today, to my mind, like while we all talked about one minute, I still think that from my perception access to investments and productive compoundable investments is complex. It’s not affordable and it’s not available to all.
And that is what every young Indian should demand for. And it’s our job in industry to do exactly what we did with Jio, that it should be available to all. And then people will benefit from the power of compounding. I think that we talked about compounding. But money in a bank account lying in simple interest is not compounding. Money in stock market is compounding. And India has an efficient market. We have now regulated it well.
And if we can channelize this money to grow for every Indian along with them, that is the opportunity that we have where hundreds of millions of Indians become owners of wealth and don’t only observe wealth creation. And I think that India is well equipped. The institutional mechanism as well as the corporate mechanism is aligned with that very fact that we are here utilizing all the technologies to enable this for Indians is there.
The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity Ahead
And within this framework, right, there are still many, many unsolved problems. And even after three decades, there’ll be many unsolved problems. So the opportunity for startups, think in a big macro piece, right? It’s $110 trillion world, $4.5 trillion India. Right, $4.5 trillion. The $110 trillion world with AI productivity will go up to a $300 trillion world in three decades, right?
India has the opportunity to take its share. So there is like $35 trillion. We have $30 trillion of new value that has to be created and that means there is $30 trillion of new market value. And that is what people will participate in in the next three decades. And that’s why even hundred Reliances might not be enough. But that’s the opportunity for a young Indian starting today.
SHEREEN BHAN: Larry Fink, your message to young Indians in the context of what you’ve seen happen in the other countries that you operate in.
LARRY FINK: Mostly believe in your own country, believe in the opportunity growth. I mean think about it. If India can grow 10% a year, let’s assume this. The stock market only grows at 10% a year. It generally grows at a multiple of the growth of the GDP. But let’s assume it, you know, that means you’re doubling your pool of money every six and a half years. Okay, that’s a pretty good outcome. That’s much better than keeping your money in a bank account.
And to me that’s the foundational issue. Grow with your country. And if you believe that there’s leverage in the system, which there is, you’re going to, if the economy grows at 10%, the equity markets are going to grow, you know, five, six points above that over time. And so to me that is the, that’s the foundational to build financial security, dignity when you’re in retirement. And to me that is a whole foundational issue for a successful economy.
The Foundation of Partnership
SHEREEN BHAN: You know, you spend a lot of your time fishing, Larry. I believe this deal got done in a car and it wasn’t fishing. No, no, you were not fishing. But what was the bait?
LARRY FINK: Friendship.
SHEREEN BHAN: Friendship. That is the perfect note to end this conversation. Larry Fink, Mukesh Ambani, thank you so very much for joining us and giving us a long term perspective of the strength of the India story and the strength of this partnership. Appreciate your time.
Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for Larry Fink and Mukesh Ambani.
MUKESH AMBANI: Thank you. Brilliant as usual. Thank you. Thank you.
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