Juhi Chawla's husband Jay Mehta recalls being ‘almost destroyed' by debt trap, made a ‘small investment' of $75 million in KKR during ‘a difficult time'

Indian Express

27-05-2025

Shah Rukh Khan purchased his cricket team Kolkata Knight Riders in 2007 but he wasn't the sole owner of the company. To date, SRK owns the team along with his Red Chillies Entertainment partner Juhi Chawla and her husband Jay Mehta. When the trio bought the team, they brought a lot of glamour to a new format of cricket and soon after, even though there team wasn't the best performer, they were getting all the limelight, thanks to the superstar owner. In an earlier interview, Jay spoke about investing in the team and said that even though people around him told him he 'crazy' about making this investment, he was confident that this would work.
In a chat shared on Institute for Management Development IMD's YouTube channel, Jay was asked to share some words of wisdom after his many years of business experience and he shared, 'First of all, don't take on too much debt because we got into a debt trap and it almost destroyed us. Secondly, you have to build a great team, try and hire the best people and going forward… I think, again curiosity, reading a lot, learning about business practices, things like that. Keeping yourself informed about what's going on and keeping yourself ahead of the curve. I think those are important things.'
Jay said that his business was going through a difficult time when he got a chance to invest in cricket and so he, along with his other partners, made an investment of $75 million to buy KKR. 'In between all this, when we were also going through the difficult times, I got an opportunity to invest in cricket. Everybody said you are crazy, completely crazy. I said, 'look, I really believe in this. I want to do it'. When the auction came up, it was like a $75 million acquisition and I had partnered with a friend of mine to do this but other people were actually taken the document and not understood the business model and when you looked at the business model, it was a cash flow model,' he said.
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Jay shared that the investment was 'very small' but he believed that this format of the fame was going to become big. 'So the investment was very small and I really believed that okay, this is really going to turn around and cricket is going to become big, like American football in the US, or football in Europe. So I took a punt, invested in it and it's inarguably the best investment I have made,' he said.
KKR has won three Indian Premiere League titles so far.