What The Hell America!

This article is adapted from Rest of World’s recent feature: Inside the spectacular rise and crash of India’s largest EV company

Bhavish Aggarwal is the CEO of Ola Electric, India’s largest electric vehicle company. Aggarwal’s path to EV success began with gas-powered taxis. In 2010, he was a recent graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay when he quit his job at Microsoft to launch Ola Cabs. The company quickly became seen as India’s answer to Uber. Ola’s rise caught the attention of investors such as Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, which poured more than $200 million into the company. Ola experimented with food-delivery services, an e-commerce venture, a platform for selling used cars, but these projects didn’t find the same success. 

In 2017, Aggarwal registered Ola Electric as a subsidiary of Ola Cabs. It later secured major investments from Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, and SoftBank. During the pandemic, Ola pivoted to manufacturing electric scooters. In the media frenzy around Ola Electric’s 2021 launch, Bhavish Aggarwal was touted as a visionary. India, the fifth-largest economy in the world, is a country where very few people can afford cars. As a result, around 250 million of its 1.4 billion people rely on mopeds, scooters, and motorcycles.

“Just like the revolution that gave us our freedom in 1947, this one will give us our freedom from petrol,” Aggarwal declared at the launch. Often referred to as India’s Elon Musk, Aggarwal has matched the Tesla CEO’s penchant for social media feuds, long workdays, demanding expectations of employees, and towering ambition. In recent years, he has also repeatedly praised India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi while positioning himself as a patriot. “Tesla is for the West; Ola is for the rest,” Aggarwal has often said.

Bhavish Aggarwal was born in Ludhiana, Punjab, in 1985. The Aggarwals are among the most influential clans in the Bania community, historically one of the most affluent classes in India’s caste system. The two richest Indians are both Banias, as are a number of prominent Indian businessmen and startup founders. “I am a Bania,” Aggarwal told one interviewer, describing his path to becoming a businessman. “I had those genes in me.”

Between 2022 and 2024, Ola sold almost 800,000 scooters, about a third of all electric scooter sales in India. Ola Electric’s IPO in August 2024 made Aggarwal one of the country’s youngest billionaires. Since then, things have been increasingly rocky. Following high-profile scooter crashes and safety issues, as well as increased competition from more-established rivals, Ola’s share price has sunk by a third since its high last August. 

People who have worked with Aggarwal closely find him brilliant, with a gift for solving big problems. Some former executives also told Rest of World that Aggarwal micromanages and routinely berates even his senior hires, leading to high turnover rates. Three former executives said they saw Aggarwal throw pens at people to get their attention. Two of them said they saw him tear pages and smash laptops on tables to express disappointment or impatience. In October 2024, Ola stock dipped 10% when Aggarwal got into a Muskian fight on X with a popular comedian who had criticized Ola’s after-sales service. 

A former senior executive described Aggarwal as driven by grand visions: “‘I want to be the fastest person to the market. I want to have the biggest factory. I want to have the most market share. I want to define the electric revolution. I want to destroy the competition.’ These are the things that motivate [Bhavish].” But, this executive and others said, Aggarwal can also lose interest in the follow-through of his big projects.

In March, even as Ola Electric started delivering its latest model of scooters, the company announced plans to slash over 1,000 jobs due to projected losses and declining market share. Meanwhile, Aggarwal’s focus seems to have shifted to a new project called Krutrim AI, which he has said will be a ChatGPT-like large language model with “Indian cultural sensibilities.”