Insulted by Rolls Royce in Dubai, Indian Billionaire Joy Alukkas Now Owns a Fleet of Luxury Cars

Insulted by Rolls Royce in Dubai, Indian Billionaire Joy Alukkas Now Owns a Fleet of Luxury Cars

Joy Alukkas, chairman of the Joyalukkas jewelry group, recently shared that he bought his first Rolls Royce and was spurred into it by an event that left him scarred. He is now 67, one of the richest men in India at number 50, with an evaluated worth of $4.4 billion.

The incident began in 2000 when the businessman from Malayali, United Arab Emirates, went to a Rolls-Royce shop in Dubai. An staffer greeted him as soon as he entered the upscale showroom and asked, “What are you looking for, sir?” Alukkas was cited as saying, “I told them I wanted to see the car, a Rolls Royce,” in a CNBC-TV18 interview.

The employee was not friendly, which was the opposite of what he had hoped for. “No, no, no. To purchase an automobile, visit the Mitsubishi showroom. The worker allegedly said to Alukkas, whose jewelry firm has its headquarters in Thirssur, Kerala, “You can get a car there.”

Now Alukkas felt humiliated by the very attitude of disdain and decided on the spot to buy the very car that he was discouraged from seeing.
“‘I was ashamed by this kind of behaviour, so I decided to purchase this car,’ he said.

Well, true enough to his words, he bought the Rolls Royce. But after buying he felt he did not require that ultravariety of vehicle at all. Instead, he decided to gift the car as a mega prize for their annual raffle draw held by his jewellery chain in UAE.

In March this year, Alukkas was in the news again, buying his latest luxury on wheels: a ₹6 crore Rolls-Royce Cullinan.

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Who is Joy Alukkas?

This, in reality, is the fairy tale that Joy Alukkas’s success story embraces. A school dropout in 1987, he left for the Middle East to open his family’s first overseas store in Abu Dhabi.

He then branched out on his own and created the Joyalukkas brand, which has grown to a global jewelry powerhouse today with 100 outlets across India and 60 more overseas, employing over 9,000 people.

The group also has the world’s largest gold jewelry retail outlet located in Chennai. According to Forbes, Alukkas’s fortune had a ninefold jump in the past decade, rising from $2.8 billion in 2023 to $4.4 billion, ranking him now 712 in the Forbes list of billionaires in 2024.