Ananda Krishnan

Ananda Krishnan (1 April 1938 – 28 November 2024) was a Malaysian entrepreneur, founder of the Usaha Tegas group, who built one of Southeast Asia's great telecommunications and media empires — Maxis, Astro and the MEASAT satellites — from consultancy and oil beginnings, and was at his death Malaysia's third-richest man ^{1 2}.

Krishnan was born on 1 April 1938 at Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, to Tamil parents, and was educated at Vivekananda Tamil School and Victoria Institution, then at the University of Melbourne, before taking an MBA at Harvard Business School, graduating in 1964. He founded the consultancy MAI Holdings and then, through Usaha Tegas, his holding company, moved into oil trading and gambling consultancy before the ventures that made his name. He died of natural causes on 28 November 2024 in the Swiss Alps, aged 86 ^{1 2}. Two independent texts attest his faith for the man himself: the English article states that he was a follower of Buddhism, and the Tamil article states it in its own wording; his son's vocation as a Theravada Buddhist monk is family background and is not what the record rests on ^{1 3}.

Krishnan launched Malaysia's first direct-to-home satellite television service, Astro, in 1996, built the Maxis mobile network into one of the country's largest operators, and put the MEASAT satellites into orbit; his interests also ran to property, power generation and entertainment. He was known for shunning publicity, and gave through the Yu Cai Foundation to education and other causes ¹.

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