How Desi Bling’s richest cast member Rizwan Sajan made his jaw-dropping $2.5 billion fortune
He's got a rags to riches story
If you’ve already inhaled half of Desi Bling on Netflix, you’ll know the cast are operating on a level of wealth most of us literally cannot comprehend. Private drivers, designer fits, skyscraper apartments, the usual billionaire behaviour. Even among all the flashy Dubai glamour, one cast member is very obviously in a financial league of his own: Rizwan Sajan.
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His backstory sounds more like a film plot than real life. Rizwan is the founder and chairman of the Danube Group, a gigantic Dubai-based company involved in everything from real estate to building materials and home interiors. Basically, if you’ve seen a luxury tower in Dubai, there’s a decent chance his company had something to do with it.
Today, his estimated net worth sits around a jaw-dropping $2.5 billion.
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Unlike a lot of reality TV millionaires who inherited family money or married into wealth, Rizwan’s story is very much a started from the bottom situation.
He grew up in Ghatkopar, a lower-middle-class area of Mumbai, and things became incredibly difficult for his family after his father died unexpectedly. Rizwan had to leave school at just 16 years old so he could help support everyone financially.
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Before the billionaire lifestyle, he was doing whatever jobs he could to make money. We’re talking selling books, making box files and even selling fireworks on the street. His life changed after moving to Kuwait as a teenager, where he worked as a trainee salesman. Apparently, he was naturally brilliant at sales and quickly figured out how to connect with customers and close deals.
Then came another major turning point: The Gulf War forced him to leave Kuwait and head back to India. But instead of giving up, Rizwan eventually moved to Dubai in the early 1990s and started his own trading business from scratch. That tiny company would later become the Danube Group, now one of the biggest business empires in the region.
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The company massively expanded across real estate and construction, with operations stretching across countries including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, China, India and even Canada.
One of the biggest reasons behind his billionaire status is reportedly the payment plans he introduced into Dubai’s property market. Instead of expecting buyers to pay huge amounts upfront, his company made luxury apartments more financially accessible through flexible payment schemes, which ended up being hugely successful.
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