This Italian Entrepreneur Became A Billionaire Investing In India. Up Next: Space And AI
January 22, 2026
Filippo Ghirelli made a small fortune in Italy and took a big bet on one of India’s largest refineries. That deal made him a billionaire, and now he’s setting out to build an empire from private airports in Europe to data centers in outer space.
On a sunny spring afternoon in Monaco, Filippo Ghirelli strikes a cheerful tone as he turns his laptop around to show off a view of the Mediterranean from his office window. “I’ve been living here for more than five years. It’s a great base,” he says on a video call, before rattling off a list of cities—London, New York, Dubai—he often travels to for business.
Three months later, he speaks with Forbes again, this time from London. “After graduating from college [in Rome], I left for Africa,” he says, listing more countries—Guinea, Mali—where he first started working in engineering on infrastructure projects.
Ghirelli, 45, has had a peripatetic career. He made a small fortune in real estate in Italy and North Africa in his late 20s and early 30s, then nearly lost it all in Egypt during the Arab Spring. Later he returned to Italy and reinvented himself, founding a firm that reduced energy costs for large companies.
But Ghirelli has India to thank for the lion’s share of his estimated $1.5 billion fortune. In January 2023, Ghirelli closed the deal of a lifetime. Using the proceeds from the partial sale of his energy efficiency firm and real estate investments, he picked up a 25% stake in India’s second-largest oil refinery, located on the country’s western coast, from Singapore-based oil trading giant Trafigura.
When Trafigura and Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft first bought the refinery in 2017 alongside Moscow-based investment firm UCP, the firm was valued at $12.9 billion including debt. Trafigura financed 85% of its portion with a bank loan, paying the rest in cash.
Ghirelli had first expressed interest in buying Trafigura’s stake in 2020. The transaction technically closed in 2021 but was delayed by Indian antitrust authorities.The deal was finally announced in 2023—11 months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—when Trafigura was trying to distance itself from Russian businesses. Ghirelli says that had no effect on the price or his decision to invest, and he bought Trafigura’s stake for $169 million—a 42% discount to what Trafigura paid in 2017. Now, Forbes estimates that stake is worth at least $1.1 billion, net of debt.
Besides the refinery, the firm—called Nayara Energy—also owns India’s largest privately-owned network of gas stations and a deep-water port. As India ramps up imports of cheap Russian oil for its rapidly-growing economy and population, Nayara has profited handsomely. It recorded net income of $760 million on $17.6 billion in revenues in its fiscal year ending in March 2025, up 500% and 25%, respectively, since 2022.
“We’ve seen the value of the business grow exponentially,” says Ghirelli. “It’s a financial investment that’s been particularly fortunate.”
Nayara is arguably one of India’s most coveted assets. “Nayara has a very important role. India is a growing country where fuel demand is continuously on the rise,” says Pankaj Srivastava, senior vice president of commodity markets at energy research firm Rystad Energy. “Nayara supplies a significant amount of the country’s domestic fuel needs. It’s very strategically located.”
According to a March report in Indian outlet The Morning Context, both Saudi Arabia’s state-owned giant Aramco and Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s conglomerate Reliance were trying to buy Nayara. A Times of India story in June said Rosneft was asking for up to $20 billion. But sale talks stalled in July, when the European Union imposed sanctions on Nayara due to Rosneft’s involvement. That led to banks halting payments for the firm, Microsoft cutting off access to its cloud service products and a ban on exports to Europe. Iraq and Saudi Arabia—which had made up 37% of Nayara’s oil imports before the sanctions, with the rest coming from Russia—also halted exports. Representatives for Rosneft and UCP didn’t respond to requests for comment. A representative for Saudi Aramco declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Reliance Industries told Forbes the firm is “not in talks to acquire Nayara.”
The firm recovered quickly. Nayara sells about two-thirds of its fuel domestically, so being cut off from Europe didn’t have much of an impact. It also found new export markets, including Brazil, Sudan and Turkey, and worked with local banks to facilitate payments. Now, Nayara sources virtually all of its oil from Russia and is back to refining at close to full capacity.
“Despite pressure on multiple fronts, Nayara has managed to scale up operations,” says Sumit Ritolia, an analyst at trade intelligence platform Kpler. “Ready access to discounted Russian crude, new logistics patterns, emerging export markets, and a broader network of buyers willing to transact under sanctions have collectively enabled the refinery to operate near its economically optimal capacity.”
Ghirelli, for his part, says that he’s been a passive minority investor and hasn’t even talked to anyone at Rosneft. He also doesn’t think the sanctions have hurt his investment.
“The company essentially relies on the Indian market. If all of its sales were in Europe, or in the U.S., then maybe it would have been a problem, but [the sanctions] didn’t have any impact on the company’s performance,” he says, adding: “If anything, it could help speed up a sale, but we’ll have to see.”
If Nayara were to sell for anything close to the figures cited in press reports—or even Forbes’ more conservative estimates—Ghirelli would net a more than 500% gain. But whatever happens with Nayara, Ghirelli is looking ahead. He launched a new investment firm in 2024 named Infracorp, which says it will build everything from spaceports and private airports to orbital data centers and offshore nuclear reactors.
“The objective is to invest in systemic infrastructure,” he says, rattling off an ambitious laundry list of current and future investments. “We want to create energy for the grid. We’re working a lot on decentralized AI. We bought our first airport, which will become Europe’s most important private jet terminal. We’re working on space modules, on future space stations and orbital data centers. In the next six months to a year, we’re going to come out with some very interesting projects.”
It might seem like little more than a pipe dream. But Ghirelli claims to have surrounded himself with industry experts in each of those fields, seeking their advice on how to turn his lofty dreams into reality. He also insists he’s starting small—with a private airport near Monaco and a waste-to-energy plant in southern Italy, for example.
“He’s someone who can see the bigger picture and go for it,” says Stefano Poli, chief commercial officer for Israeli space computing firm Ramon Space and an advisor on Ghirelli’s space-related investments. “He can play chess on multiple chessboards.”
Adds Manfredi Lefebvre d’Ovidio, a fellow Monaco-based billionaire who made his fortune in the cruise and travel industry: “He’s extremely entrepreneurial. He tends to actually do the things he talks about.”
B
orn into a middle-class family in Rome in 1980, Ghirelli grew up with entrepreneurial parents. His father owned a construction firm, while his mother ran an agricultural company before turning to real estate.
After studying civil engineering at the University of Rome and obtaining a master’s in business administration from Luiss Business School, he left Italy to work for construction firm Astaldi as a project engineer in west Africa in 2003. “It was an amazing experience but also very difficult, because these are countries where it’s hard to build,” he says, pointing to projects he worked on including a bridge between Guinea and Mali.
He then worked on highway construction in Turkey before returning to Italy in 2006 to develop high-speed rail projects for Italian industrial giant Impregilo, now known as Webuild. At age 27, he joined De Angelis Group, a small Italian real estate firm that owned apartments, hotels and medical clinics in Italy and France.
Tragedy struck in 2009 when the De Angelis group’s founder died in a car crash. Ghirelli says he’d been in talks with the founder to get an equity stake in the business, but after De Angelis’ death he negotiated for ownership of key projects he’d been working on including a mall. He then set up his own construction company and started investing in residential and commercial construction in Morocco and Egypt.
In 2013, he faced yet another setback when anti-government protests broke out in Egypt. Ghirelli was forced to leave and faced major losses on his developments there, so he had to start over once again in Italy. “It was a significant loss, but also a fundamental lesson to continue building,” he says.
He then pivoted to energy efficiency and launched Genera Group, which works with clients including tire maker Pirelli and consumer goods giant Unilever on energy-saving projects—say, building solar panels, installing more efficient lighting or capturing heat lost from industrial processes—and then takes a cut of the cost savings.
He sold a 49% stake to German asset management group IKAV in 2017 for an undisclosed amount. Three years later, he bought back Ikav’s shares and sold 75% to Swiss investment firm Susi Partners for an initial $30 million. That’s also when he started thinking about investing in Nayara.
“We had two goals. One was to build a biorefinery to produce sustainable aviation fuel, which helps planes pollute less than using regular jet fuel,” says Ghirelli. “The other was to make a deal with the Indian government to produce electric auto rickshaws and have battery swaps in Nayara’s more than 6,500 gas stations.”
The war in Ukraine derailed those goals; Ghirelli went ahead with the deal but took a step back. “We decided to become a passive investor [in Nayara],” he says. “We played our part on the sustainability side, but we focused our resources on other fronts.”
After selling the rest of Genera to Susi Partners in December 2024 for an undisclosed sum, and with an eye to possibly exiting Nayara as well, Ghirelli is now fully focused on his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink investment firm Infracorp. He’s dividing his investments into four broad areas: transportation and infrastructure, energy transition and independence, the space economy, and decentralized AI and security.
So far, he claims to have committed more than $100 million and invested in more than 65 projects. Those include biomethane and bioethanol plants in the U.S., a plant converting car waste to energy in Italy and 18 data centers under development in Italy and France. He says he’s also working on engineering plans for orbital data centers and offshore nuclear plants in Italy.
The most prominent deal he’s announced so far is the 2024 purchase of Riviera Airport, a small private jet terminal on Italy’s northwestern coast near Genoa that’s just an 80-minute drive (or a 25-minute helicopter ride) from Monaco. Ghirelli plans to turn it into an aviation hub for the wealthy city-state that’s too small to host an airport of its own, and make it the first of a network of 16 private airports throughout Europe, with an investment cost of roughly $60 million apiece.
“Commercial airports are becoming more difficult to access for private jets, and private flights are increasing and will keep growing as new technologies bring down their cost,” says Lefebvre d’Ovidio, pointing to electric aircraft produced by the likes of California-based Joby Aviation. “There’s huge potential for private airports.”
As for where he’ll find the funds to finance these enormous projects—aside from his own, especially if he sells his stake in Nayara—Ghirelli isn’t concerned. “When you have a business model with foreseeable cash flow, it’s pretty easy to find money,” he says. “We’re not having any problems finding funding around the world. There’s great attention from the Middle East to finance these things.”
Ghirelli’s advisors concur. “Smart people don’t use their own money. They use capital markets,” says Güçlü Batkın, CEO of Turkish eye-care chain Dünyagöz and an Infracorp advisor. “There’s a lot of money waiting to be invested all around the world. You just need to know where to capitalize and who you capitalize with, and he has a good understanding of that.”
Adds another Infracorp advisor, Massimiliano Ladovaz, CEO of VC-backed spaceflight tech firm SpinLaunch: “He has a bit of an American mindset where he’s willing to take risks. He has the ability to pivot at the right time.”
It’s way too early to judge Ghirelli’s latest bets. But there’s one thing he says he’s sure of—when he adds it all up, he’s going to beat his massive return on Nayara. “I imagine we’re going to get something close to four or five times what we’re making on Nayara,” he says. “Especially on space and data centers.”
If he does, it will likely be years from now.
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