The Saturday Profile: A Brazilian Magnate Points to Himself for Inspiration

EIKE BATISTA fidgeted in his chair, bristling at the memory of his former anonymity.

“Brazilians think that I appeared in the year 2000 from scratch,” said Mr. Batista, Brazil’s richest man.

Few Brazilians had heard about his adventures in the Amazon in his early 20s, he said, when he dropped out of college in West Germany to trade gold and bet his winnings on building a clunky-looking machine in the rainforest to process the precious metal without pick-and-shovel miners.

Instead, Mr. Batista surfaced in the gossip magazines only in the 1990s after he married the model and Carnival dancer Luma de Oliveira. Back then, his father, Eliezer Batista, a beloved former government official, told him to keep a low profile, as his son’s rapidly expanding fortune made him a target for kidnappers.

Mr. Batista has done anything but hide. At 55, he is not only considered South America’s wealthiest man, with a fortune estimated by Forbes at $30 billion, but he is also one of Brazil’s most public figures, a serial entrepreneur with boundless energy to sell himself and his country.

“My race horse is Brazil,” he said from the sprawling 22nd-floor office of his EBX Corporation headquarters, which has a long deck overlooking Guanabara Bay. “And Brazil today has the wealth that America had at the turn of the century.”

While President Dilma Rousseff has held up Mr. Batista as an example of private-sector execution, rival businessmen have contended that Mr. Batista’s chief skill was as a salesman, persuading investors to bet about $24 billion on his start-up companies in mining, oil, logistics, power generation and shipbuilding.

“They think he sells too many dreams and not enough reality,” said Olavo Monteiro de Carvalho, a former partner in an Amazon gold mine.

Early this year, Mr. Batista has a chance to shed that label when his oil company, OGX, is expected to begin producing crude from an estimated 10 billion barrels of offshore discoveries.

Mr. Batista’s logistics company also plans to open a $2 billion “superport” in Rio next year that he said would be Latin America’s version of Rotterdam. Set on land one and a half times the size of Manhattan, it will handle some 350 million tons of imports and exports a year, including oil and iron ore from Mr. Batista’s companies, he said.

Brazilians remain divided on the man most simply know as Eike. Some view him as showy and a megalomaniac, scoffing at photos of him in pink ties and posing beside his $1 million Mercedes McLaren.

Mr. Batista is unapologetic, saying he is trying to break a cultural conservatism around wealth that his father was a part of, and teach Brazilians to look up to their entrepreneurs the way Americans do.

“I want to help a whole generation of Brazilians to be proud,” he said. “I am rich, yes. I have built it myself. I have not stolen it. Show it. Just brutally show it.”

These days, Mr. Batista is fully unshackled. He travels the world in his $61 million Gulfstream jet, often giving talks, and interacts with his more than 539,600 Twitter followers, to whom he offers “educational phrases” meant to inspire.

In his office, he displays framed photos of his days as a champion powerboat racer and a sword given to him by a grateful Japanese partner in a gold deal.

He peppered his German-accented English — one of five languages he speaks fluently — with French phrases like “Voilà!” and “C’est la vie.” His infectious laugh recalled The Riddler from the 1960s “Batman” television show.

Mr. Batista said his journey began as a “quest towards financial independence” and a burning desire to escape the shadow of his famous father, a Brazilian engineer who helped increase Brazil’s international trade in commodities.

BORN in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Mr. Batista is one of seven children. When he was small he suffered from chronic asthma. His mother, a German, put him in a swimming pool. “It opened up my lungs,” he said. He remains an avid swimmer and runner.

When he was a teenager, his family moved to Europe, living in Geneva, Düsseldorf and Brussels. Mr. Batista’s father, who back in Brazil had been president of the state mining company, decided to go into a “friendly exile” when Brazil’s military government branded him a Communist for his fluency in Russian, one of several languages he speaks. In Europe, Eliezer Batista worked to build the mining company’s international business.

In the 1960s, he recognized Brazil could profit greatly by exporting iron ore to Japan. But the distance was tremendous, so Mr. Batista persuaded shipbuilders to construct huge carriers, and he led the development of a Brazilian port deep enough for the ships to dock.

The younger Mr. Batista said his father “did a lot of incredible things for Brazil,” but he was “never a risk taker.”

His parents returned to Brazil when Mr. Batista was 18. He stayed behind in Brussels and went door to door selling insurance, later trading diamonds and corned beef.

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The Saturday Profile: Felipe Cubillos’s Mission to Help Chile Until the End

THREE days after an earthquake and tsunami rattled Chile last year, Felipe Cubillos borrowed a friend’s helicopter and flew over the devastated coast.

“I saw everything destroyed, the chaos, the absence of the state, the desolation, the sadness, tremendous confusion,” he said.

Mr. Cubillos said he also saw his calling. Tapping his contacts around the world from years in business, he formed an organization and immediately began aiding the reconstruction. The first project, completed 20 days after the tsunami, was to build a school for 150 children in Iloca. Over the next 40 days, the organization built 17 more schools. Preschools and low-income houses followed, as did assistance to fishermen to repair their boats. By March of this year, it was helping small businesses start over.

“The poor in Chile need three things: capital, training and contacts,” Mr. Cubillos said. “We try to serve as a bridge between the people who need help and the people who can provide it.”

As tragic as it was, the quake “opened a window of opportunity” to help less fortunate Chileans. He saw it as the beginning of a special phase of his life.

On Sept. 2, he and 20 others boarded a Chilean air force plane bound for Robinson Crusoe Island, 420 miles from the coast, where his organization was helping to rebuild one of the areas most affected by the wave. He was traveling with other volunteers and a television crew, on the way to inaugurate a new home for tsunami survivors and businesses on the island.

Amid fierce winds, the plane failed twice to land and crashed. The authorities said there were no survivors.

Mr. Cubillos was a rare species in Chile, said officials and people who worked with him: a highly successful businessman with a social conscience.

“He is an extraordinary person, the private citizen who has done the most for reconstruction,” Rodrigo Pérez, Chile’s Housing Minister, said after the plane went down.

Born in the capital, Santiago, Mr. Cubillos, 49, was one of four children of Hernán Cubillos, who served as foreign minister to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The elder Mr. Cubillos actively conspired with Navy officers to oust former President Salvador Allende in 1973.

HE was Pinochet’s first civilian foreign minister, serving from 1978 to 1980. He oversaw negotiations over the Beagle Channel, talks that eventually avoided a military confrontation with Argentina at the last minute. But in 1980, Pinochet and his delegation were forced to return to Chile while in mid-flight to the Philippines when that country’s leader, Ferdinand Marcos, suddenly canceled the visit for unexplained reasons. Pinochet blamed the elder Mr. Cubillos for the humiliating retreat and ousted him from his cabinet.

The former minister returned to the business world, working for major beer and tobacco companies, investment firms and banks. He died in 2001.

His son, Felipe, studied law at the University of Chile and followed his father into the business world at a young age, joining the salmon industry just as it was taking off in Chile. At 25, he was a manager at Eicomar, a company that was one of the first to experiment in salmon cultivation.

He started a handful of businesses, including an Internet company, as well as boat repair and sea transport companies. He started a family, fathering a son and three daughters. But he still was not satisfied.

“I am drawn to the unknown, to uncertainty,” he said in an interview this year. “It’s tough for me to live with routine.”

Sailing was always a passion, and in 2008 he pursued a dream to sail around the world. To complete the Portimão Global Ocean Race, he got sponsors, sold one of his companies and went to France to build a sailboat.

He named the 40-foot boat the Cape Horn Challenge. After departing for his voyage from Portugal, he and a friend, José Muñoz, “lived in permanent crisis,” especially during the 30 days sailing from South Africa to New Zealand, 27 of which were under storm, he said. After passing Cape Horn, at the southernmost point of Chile, there were times when the boat’s electronics did not work.

Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago, Chile.

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