The Sunday Times Magazine • 37manufacturer, he says, have been made in
15-minute meetings. There have also been
savings from waiting until the last minute
before choosing which technology to adopt.
“We selected our technology last year,”
Fisker said. “Every year it gets cheaper.”G
upta-Fisker’s midlife blooming
into billionaire entrepreneur
seems utterly against the run
of play of her early years. Born
into a humble Indian family,
she would not step aboard an
aeroplane until her early
twenties, when she flew to
England to begin her master’s
degree at the University of
Kent in Canterbury.
Within a few years she had moved to
Cambridge, where she completed a PhD
in biotechnology — an unconventional
graduate training scheme for billionaires.
Then came the handbrake turn into
London’s banking world, where she spent
a wedge of her thirties working for Lloyds
Bank. There are fortunes to be made in
banking, of course. But this role in the
technology team at Lloyds wasn’t one of
those gigs. Gupta-Fisker used the time to
learn the ropes of accounting procedures
and commercial lending.
She would later take a job managing
investments for the property mogul
Vincent Tchenguiz. But working for the
super-rich is one thing, joining their
ranks something else entirely.
In 2011 she met Fisker, the car designer
who would soon become her husband and
business partner, but their financial
prospects hardly looked promising. Within
two years his first electric car company,
which he had started a few years before, had
veered into bankruptcy. After an auspicious
career — which included running Aston
Martin’s design studio and styling a silver
BMW for the Pierce Brosnan James Bond
film The World Is Not Enough — he had one
eye on retirement.
Gupta-Fisker would soon persuade her
husband to start up a new electric vehicle
manufacturer. But just as they set about
raising hundreds of millions of dollars in
funding, she received bad news. Gupta-
Fisker was speaking with would-be
investors in July 2020 when she broke off to
take a call from her doctor, who gave her
a breast cancer diagnosis. There would be
two operations and radiation therapy in the
months ahead. By the end of the year she
was cancer-free.
“She only missed something like one day
of work,” Fisker would later say. “That’s just
how she is. She works tirelessly.”
Fisker and his wife sound quite the
double act. “When I grew up in India
women were still tier-two citizens,” she has
said. “I have a very respectful relationship
with Henrik. We have different styles ofGupta-Fisker with her
husband, the Danish car
designer Henrik Fisker. Below:
the Ocean electric SUVworking — it’s right-brain, left-brain. Right
brain is creative, so that’s Henrik. The left
side is data-driven. That would be me.”
Those changes of direction earlier in her
career now seem to fit with a motto she
uses in her rare interviews or in mentoring
sessions with entrepreneurs. “No one can
shoot a moving target,” she says.
She champions the lessons learnt
from rejection and defeats, and her advice
to women who want to follow her lead
into male-dominated businesses is to be
willing to “try, ask or fail”.
“I got so used to hearing ‘no’ that the
only thing I knew was to get back up and
try again. That what’s life is about. It’s not
the one ‘yes’ that defines you. It’s the nine
times you hear ‘no’ and what you take
away from those experiences.”
She’s frank about the sexism that remains
in the business world. To her frustration
there are still, she says, certain types of deals
that seem only to be done between men.
How does she handle this? “I’ve learnt to
capitalise on my skills at the right moments
and in the right situations to overcome
this,” she says.
There’s no doubt Fisker Inc has made the
couple a fortune. When the shares in the
business came to be valued for this year’s
Rich List their stake was worth more than
£1 billion. Earlier share sales and other assets
should add another £200 million. The stock
has lost some of its value in recent weeks.
Yet money, the pair insist, is not the
motivation. As if to make the point, in
March last year Gupta-Fisker slashed her
salary from $325,000 to $58,240 — in line
with California’s minimum wage for
white-collar workers. “We’re not doing this
to get rich,” she said. “We’re doing this to
make really cool green cars, affordable cars.”
The bad blood with Tesla seems to
linger. In late April this year, just after
Musk’s proposed plan to buy Twitter was
announced, Fisker tweeted that his 86,000
followers should now keep up with his news
on Instagram. Before long Fisker’s Twitter
account was deleted.
All that certainly adds a little frisson to
the Fisker-Tesla duel. But can the couple
really take on the world’s richest man and
win? Fisker Inc remains Mini Metro-sized
compared with Musk’s empire — the £1
billion of investment in the Ocean is, well, a
drop in the ocean. To take on the giants like
Tesla and VW will cost tens of billions and
new competitors spring up all the time. But
Gupta-Fisker has spent much of her life
overcoming the odds. You might not want
to bet against her now nTHE FISKER OCEAN,
AN ALL-ELECTRIC
SUV, WILL BE A
WHOPPING £20,000
CHEAPER THAN ITS
TESLA RIVAL
Rich List 2022
ALAMY, GETTY IMAGES