His father died in 1966 and Azim Premji, then still a student, came home to run a vegetable-oil company. He turned it into Wipro. The pivot from cooking oil to computing is one of the odder routes to building a global technology-services firm, and it worked.
He was frugal in a way that became legend inside the company, and inflexible about ethics in a way that cost real business. Wipro did not pay bribes. In the India of that period, that was not a slogan — it meant losing contracts and saying so out loud.
He treated his fortune as a trust to be deployed, not a trophy to be displayed.
The philanthropy is the larger legacy. Through the Azim Premji Foundation he has committed the great majority of his fortune to Indian education, which makes him one of the most significant private givers anywhere in the developing world.
Billions have gone into schools, teacher training and a university carrying his name. What that changed, beyond the classrooms, is the expectation. A generation of wealthy Indian founders now has to answer a question Premji made unavoidable: what is the money actually for?
Premji was studying electrical engineering at Stanford when his father died, and left without finishing; he completed the degree decades later, in 2000. Western India Vegetable Products, as the company was then called, moved into hydrogenated fats, soaps and lighting, and after IBM left India in the late 1970s it began building computers. Software services for overseas clients followed, and that became the core of Wipro.
Wipro listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2000 and grew alongside Infosys and TCS through the outsourcing boom of the following decade. Premji stepped down as executive chairman in July 2019, handing the role to his son Rishad, while staying on the board as founder chairman. Wipro Consumer Care, the descendant of the original vegetable-oil business, still sells soaps and household brands.
The foundation's work is concentrated on public schools. The Azim Premji Foundation works with state governments on teacher development, and Azim Premji University, set up in Bengaluru in 2010, trains teachers and development professionals. In 2019 he committed a further block of Wipro shares to the endowment, bringing his total contribution to about 21 billion dollars at the time. In 2013 he became the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge.