Welcome to Bollywood Billionaires, where you and I quit the red carpet and walk into the boardroom to see how Bollywood stars actually stack wealth through equity, startups, sports teams, beauty lines, restaurants, real estate, and the quieter cash engines away from rolling credits. Think of this as a money map of Indian cinema, a guided tour through cap tables and side bets that turn fame into enduring power and portfolios that outlast Friday box office.
Abhishek Bachchan is never more interesting than when the camera is not on him. The clearest example of that is the night of 31st August in 2014. It was the final match for his first foray into sports as an entrepreneur. Jaipur Pink Panthers was going to play off against Ronnie Screwvala’s U Mumba. By the second half of this thrilling match, everyone knew that the Panthers would most likely win. Yet, Abhishek the promoter and the one who had built this team together, stood like a producer on the first Friday of a risky release, hands together, eyes fixed, not talking to anyone, already calculating the next substitution as if it were Saturday morning box office.
The league was new, the lights were doing that overbright television glow, every commentator was talking like we had rediscovered a civilisational sport. When Jaipur Pink Panthers won, Abhishek did not give us the practiced celebrity cheer. He sagged with relief instead. Recently, as a guest on a podcast he grinned and called the buy a “shot in the dark”, admitting he had no business acumen and that every decision of his went against the textbook, “I believed people will want to watch this. It’s just an instinct that you have. I felt that this could work,” which is exactly how some good bets are born in India, in the ridiculous space between instinct and audacity – that tiny punt he took on a sport and a team, is today worth hundreds of crores.
When family stories become brand stories
What makes that win even more delicious is that the name of the team came from a family tease. As a child Amitabh would call him Tiger. One day kid Abhishek fired back and called his father a panther. Years later, when he needed to put a name and an animal and a colour on a team from Jaipur, that private moment from Juhu became part of a sports brand. Pink is his daughter Aradhya’s favourite colour and Jaipur was a city that both he and Aishwarya had visited together. For Abhishek, each investment that he makes is always a personal connection, more than just a business calculation.
Filmography that built an investor
To fully understand why Abhishek’s money moves feel different, you have to sit with his filmography for a minute and resist the temptation of reducing it to a graph. Even though the mighty JP Dutta launched him and Kareena together in Refugee in 2000, the early years of his career were rough at best. Many of his first many films did not work. It took Mani Ratnam’s Yuva & Guru, then YRF’s Dhoom and Bunty Aur Babli to give him the image of a performer who could hold his own with bigger names. Then there were years when he was in multistarrers and the credit often went to the other guy. His filmography page shows you an actor who can deliver a Dasvi or a Ghoomer for critical acclaim and Ludo for fun, but who will almost never trust the Box Office to pay for the school fees. So in the early 2010s he invested in businesses that did not care if his call time was at six in the morning.
Building a sports empire
He bought kabaddi first. Then Chennaiyin Football Club along with Vita Dani and M S Dhoni, which plugged him into the south market and into a different set of business families. Two titles followed in the Indian Super League in 2015 and 2018, which is a very civilised way of saying he was a champion in two sports before half our power stars had even worked out their Instagram pricing decks.
Now factor the leagues themselves. Pro Kabaddi League in the very first season pulled an estimated 435 million television viewers, second only to the IPL that year, a mad number for a sport that until yesterday was a schoolyard dare. A decade later in 2024 the league hit 226 million viewers in the first 90 matches itself – the only sport outside cricket that keeps crossing the 200 million mark in viewership regularly. In parallel football, the ISL in the 2024 to 2025 season saw 1,934,000 in-stadium audiences across 163 matches with the league operator finally swinging into profit with a 39 percent revenue lift. That is the ecosystem Abhishek is seated inside, an ecosystem that is shedding the training wheels and paying for its own breakfast.
The star who gets paid less than his Kabaddi players
Sit with him in a dugout during any of the matches and the thing that stands out is not posture but memory. The Amazon Prime Video Special on Jaipur Pink Panthers – Sons of the Soil – caught it without makeup. He knows not only the players, but also the parents, sends them recordings, does the shoulder squeeze after a bad raid, cries a little on camera when the season goes sideways, and endures the editing process that exposes ego like nothing else. He also says the quiet part out loud when he wants to. “Sometimes kabaddi players get paid more than me,” he told NDTV before Season 10, a throwaway line that tells you that this is a star who prefers to take the hit on the chin rather than fake swagger in a league that is still building its own myths.
The origin story of Abhishek’s love for Kabaddi is charmingly old school. It was watching his father play the sport in his hit 1978 film Ganga Ki Saugandh that got him interested. He narrates an interesting anecdote about how his father would chalk lines in the backyard at home and teach him how to breathe and cross the lines, how to raid and tackle. Those are details that no boardroom will ever teach you. People who grow up with a love for a game stay with it long after the glamour is gone.
A $250,000 bet that became $11.7 million
Then there is the folklore bet from 2015 too, Amitabh Bachchan alongwith Abhishek invested $250,000 into Meridian Tech, a Singapore based company, whose main asset was a site called Ziddu. Long story short, the company rode the crypto wave, turning that investment into $11.7 million in just 2.5 years. For Bollywood investors who usually like playing it safe, this was the most dramatic thing an Indian film family did in tech finance that year.
Sports and tech apart, Abhishek has also put seed money into consumer brands like Naagin, a homegrown hot sauce brand that raised a little over $1million in 2022 and has since kept growing. He has also invested in Vahdam Tea alongside cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. Then came the investment in Zepto in late 2024. For a man who likes personal stories he is certainly curating a shelf full of them.
The Real Estate Foundation
Since 2020 the Bachchans have also been among Bollywood’s most active property investors, with combined investments of about ₹219 crore across the Mumbai region alone, according to Square Yards data, and additional homes offshore. Abhishek picked up six apartments in Borivali for roughly ₹15.4 crore in June 2024, while the family portfolio for 2024 crossed the ₹100 crore mark on the back of ten Mulund purchases. Add the long held Dubai villa in Sanctuary Falls at Jumeirah Golf Estates and you get a picture of the kind of base that lets him be braver in sport and startups.
He explains the investor logic without fuss. “My father’s generation was so busy working because that was their only source of income. I think today actors are willing to make films their main, but not only, source of income. That’s what I’ve tried because that gives me the freedom and liberty to make the kind of films that I want to make that I can then afford to price more competitively. This may sound like a risk but I don’t have the pressure of running my house,” he said at an investment summit.
What it all adds up to
The moral of the story you ask? It is uncomplicated. Abhishek stopped chasing applause that vanished by Saturday night and started building things that remain when the lights cool. The films will come. The brand deals will stay. And on the nights when the whistle goes and the room forgets there is a star on the sideline, the owner who learned patience from a backyard chalked out by his father watches his team in action and smiles. That is what success looks like when you own the story, not just the scene.
(Ankit Gupta has spent almost two decades working with India Today, NDTV and Times Internet. He is a senior creative lead at Hook Media Network within the RP Sanjiv Goenka Group. He writes on the business of entertainment, fashion and lifestyle, bringing a producer mindset to reporting and analysis.)
