Brazillionaires by Cuadros Alex;

Author:Cuadros, Alex; [Cuadros, Alex;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THE PROFIT MOTIVE

A NEW RICHEST MAN, MERITOCRACY, AND THE VALUE OF MONEY

“Money in and of itself isn’t what fascinates me.”

—JORGE PAULO LEMANN ($20 BILLION)

“Jorge created a whole management culture in Brazil that is extraordinary.”

—EIKE BATISTA ($13 BILLION)

DESPITE HIS EFFORTS TO STANCH THE BLEEDING, EIKE’S WEALTH continued to shrink. In November 2012, his net worth slipped below nineteen billion dollars, and suddenly, for the first time in three years, he was not the richest person in Brazil. When I asked his people for comment, though, they sent this oddly upbeat statement from him: “Brazil deserves to have more Brazilians on this list. May all businessmen continue investing and creating jobs, like we do at EBX!” After that Eike went silent for a while, retreating from Twitter and TV as he worked to save his empire.

A buyout tycoon named Jorge Paulo Lemann took Eike’s place as Brazil’s richest man. I asked his people for comment about his new title, but he had none. Throughout his seventy-three years, he had mostly avoided press. Few had heard of him, in Brazil or abroad, even though he and his partners at 3G Capital had acquired two of America’s top consumer brands, Budweiser and Burger King. And they were working on yet another. With Warren Buffett backing them, they would soon announce the takeover of H. J. Heinz, the Pittsburgh ketchup company. Valued at twenty-eight billion dollars, it was the largest acquisition in the history of the food industry—but not the largest in Lemann’s history. In 2008 he got control of Anheuser-Busch by orchestrating a fifty-two-billion-dollar merger with Belgium’s InBev. The company that emerged was responsible for brewing one in every five beers drunk on earth.

I ended up profiling Lemann after the Heinz deal. I wasn’t too thrilled about the assignment at first. Next to Eike, he felt boring. He struck me as one of those high school overachiever types you want to dislike but can’t because they’re too nice. He’s a tennis pro who played Wimbledon and the Davis Cup as a young man. He funds scholarships at American universities for smart young Brazilians. Also, it was hard to get people to talk about him. When I called up his friends and business associates, some said he’d asked them not to speak about him with journalists. A few did agree to speak on the record, and several others off the record, but the praise was just about unanimous. One source I spoke to was an economist named Arminio Fraga. He worked under Lemann in the eighties, later advised George Soros, and then served as president of the central bank before setting up his own investment fund—Gávea, one of the initial investors in OGX. “Lemann carried out a revolution in the way people think about business,” he said.

Mostly unknown to the public at large, Lemann is a legend in the world of money. He’s seen as the man who brought meritocracy to Brazil, proof the American Dream can flourish in this nepotistic soil. Eike might proclaim these same values, but Lemann symbolized something very different.

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