Eike Batista: Making or Breaking Brazil

This case explores the meteoric rise and fall of Eike Batista, once Brazil’s richest person and the world’s seventh wealthiest in 2012. Batista began his career by investing in gold mining in the Amazon, using the network his father had built after years serving as chief executive of Brazil’s state mining giant, Vale. During the 2000s Batista exploited political connections, weak regulatory oversight and institutional voids to raise huge amounts of capital and build a multi-billion-dollar business group in mining and energy named EBX, despite weaknesses in project execution and corporate governance. Batista made use of his charismatic and multilingual personality to build a personal brand and attract funds, including $8 billion from the South African mining giant Anglo American for an unproven iron ore mining project in Minas Gerais state. His success was facilitated by the global euphoria about the potential of the BRICS, a term coined in 2001, and the 2004–2014 commodities super-cycle. In 2013 Batista’s collection of firms began to flounder, and he became entangled in huge corruption scandals. He was eventually jailed in 2017. The case provides an opportunity to understand Batista’s meteoric entrepreneurial career, and more broadly the drivers of corruption in Brazilian business, and its malign consequences.