After months of meticulous pre-wedding festivities, India’s wealthiest family is set to spend over $100 million, possibly significantly more, on their son’s wedding, making it one of the priciest nuptials in recent history.
Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s four-day wedding will showcase extravagant decorations, numerous celebrity performances, and attendees from politics, business, sports, and the arts.
Anant is the youngest son of Mukesh Ambani, the director of Reliance Industries and the 11th richest man globally, according to Forbes. Radhika Merchant comes from a prominent family with multimillionaire pharmaceutical executives as parents.
Though the Ambanis haven’t disclosed their wedding expenditure publicly, estimates suggest costs ranging from $150 million to over half a billion dollars. This covers booking musicians, chartering private jets, and hosting a feast for nearby underprivileged communities, as reported by the BBC and India Times.
Given the number of important international and Indian political figures attending, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Mumbai police have designated the wedding as a public event. Roads near the venues were closed to non-wedding guests while the groom led a convoy of luxury vehicles to commence the weekend’s celebrations.
This weekend is the climax of the couple’s festivities, yet it is not their first celebration. In March, the Ambani family hosted over a thousand guests, including Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, and Ivanka Trump, at their estate in Jamnagar, India. For the occasion, they constructed a glass palace inspired by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Palm House and featured Rihanna in her first full-length concert in almost a decade.
“I wanted to be fun, free, and young,” Merchant told Vogue about the all-night party following Rihanna’s performance. “An Indian wedding is incomplete without a lot of dancing.”
In late May, Ambani and Merchant held another pre-wedding event on the Mediterranean Sea, hosting 1,200 guests for a four-day cruise beginning in Palermo, Italy, with stops throughout the region. In Cannes, guests were treated to a surprise concert by Katy Perry, and after reboarding the ship, they enjoyed another concert featuring Pitbull.
A stop in Portofino included a performance by acclaimed opera singer Andrea Bocelli.
“It was just the most magical evening,” Merchant told Vogue about Bocelli’s performance. “I had goosebumps.”