Coffee King

An exhaustive investigation into the meteoric rise and tragic collapse of a visionary entrepreneur.

The news of V. G. Siddhartha’s tragic death in July 2019 sent shockwaves across India and raised some unsettling questions: Was his death truly an accident? What immense pressures drove a successful and influential entrepreneur to such desperation?

V. G. Siddhartha was more than the visionary founder of the ubiquitous Café Coffee Day chain – he was a titan of Indian entrepreneurship. From his humble roots in a Karnataka coffee plantation, Siddhartha built an empire that transcended coffee, venturing into finance, logistics and hospitality. With a starting capital of just ₹30,000, his company grew into India’s largest coffee curing plant, culminating in the creation of the beloved Café Coffee Day chain, with an astonishing 1,700 outlets across the country at its peak. In his remarkable thirty-three-year career, Siddhartha strategically invested in a diverse portfolio of companies, including industry giants like Infosys and Mindtree, and rubbed shoulders with top industrialists, tech pioneers and powerful politicians. At the zenith of his success in 2018, Sidhartha’s net worth was estimated at over ₹3,000 crore. Beneath this gleaming façade, however, lay a convoluted and ultimately unsustainable reality – a web of over fifty companies burdened by an ever-mounting debt of over ₹5,000 crore.

The first cracks in this meticulously constructed edifice appeared after income tax raids, followed by relentless pressure from angry lenders and investors. Through scrupulous reporting and extensive research, business journalists Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta undertake an exhaustive investigation into how Siddhartha’s mega enterprise began its inexorable descent into collapse to pose essential questions about the cost of ambition and the perils of relentless growth.