It is the flagship publication of HT Media Limited, an entity controlled by the Birla family, and is owned by Shobhana Bhartia, the daughter of K. K.

The media group owns a radio channel, Fever 104.0 FM, an education-related company, Studymate, and organises an annual Luxury Conference that has featured speakers like designer Diane von Fürstenberg, shoemaker Christian Louboutin, Gucci CEO Robert Polet and Cartier MD Patrick Normand.

[citation needed] According to Prem Shankar Jha, who wrote an official history of the newspaper in 1999, most of the early funding of the paper, therefore, came from Sikhs in Canada.

When financial troubles started in the early years, the Akalis approached two interested potential buyers from the nationalist movement.

The paper was saved from an untimely demise when Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya stepped in to realise his vision of a newspaper in Delhi.

[11] It has its roots in the Indian independence movement of the first half of the twentieth century and even faced the noted "Hindustan Times Contempt Case (August–November, 1941)" at Allahabad High Court.

[18] After the 2016 LoC strike in September, Shobhna Bhartia reportedly had started getting calls from the PM's office and from Amit Shah, and attention came to be focused on the Hate Tracker, a crowd-sourced database on the Hindustan Times website that recorded hate crimes in India which was launched under recently appointed editor Bobby Ghosh.

Hindustan Times's general Counsel Dinesh Mittal rejected the report and said Bobby Ghosh left for personal reasons.

[19] In 2017, the Frontline magazine[20] published a report which stated that Hindustan Times' editor Shishir Gupta was colluding with the government after releasing emails to Amit Shah.

[21] The Indian Express also published a report in 2017 stating that Hindustan Times Limited was linked to an offshore entity called Go4i.com, of which Bhartia and her son Priyavat were listed as directors.