Eike Batista: Golden grifter

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It's 2008 in Rio de Janeiro, the party capital of Brazil.

A businessman is in the middle of a meeting in his lavish office.

He's 58 years old.

He has a brilliant shining smile, but throughout the meeting, he remains hooked up to an intravenous drip.

The plastic pipe extends up from his arm into a bag of liquid gradually pouring into him.

The bag hangs from the pole of a giant Brazilian flag that dominates the room.

The man's health is fine, but this very morning he had looked unhappily at the greying edges of his lustrous hairline and fretted about aging.

He just wants to look a little younger.

And why shouldn't he?

He's one of the richest men in the whole world.

If he can't knock a few years off his appearance, no one can.

So the IV drip doesn't contain medicine.

Instead, he's had it packed with a range of anti-aging vitamins.

It's just his latest attempt to de-age himself.

And if this doesn't work, maybe he'll try a bit more plastic surgery.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast where each episode we take a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Sing Singh.

I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And the man hooked up to the Ivy Drip was a man called Aike Batista.

Once the richest man in Brazil and the seventh richest person in the whole world.

Yes, he is an archetypal mining magnate.

He started out with gold and then he built a network of mining, oil, gas, logistics, and shipping companies.

At his peak, he was the largest holder of mineral rights in all of Brazil and he founded the largest private port in Latin America.

And as you can tell, he is quite the character.

He's a bit of a celebrity in his homeland.

He's known for a playboy lifestyle and his eccentric approach to life.

Yep, he even became a world champion speedboat racer in his spare time, and he kept a sports car parked in his living room.

And at one point, he dreamed of being the richest person in the world, but then it all came crumbling down with a crash when the Brazilian government cracked down on corruption.

But let's go right back to the beginning and take Aike Batista from zero to his first million.

Ike Batista was born in 1956 in a small city in the Brazilian state of Minas Guerrez.

He was born into quite a wealthy and significant family in Brazil.

His father, Eliza, was a very notable figure in Brazilian politics and business.

As a young man, Eliza had joined a small state-owned mining company called Vale do Río do Say, known as Vale, as an engineer.

But by 1961, when Iike was just five, Eliza had risen through the ranks to become the company's president, and he he built Vale up into the world's largest iron ore producer.

And while president of Vale, he also served simultaneously as Minister of Mines and Energy in the government.

Conflict of interest?

A little bit of a slight conflict of interest there.

He was actually forced out of both of those positions in 1964 when the government was overthrown in a coup which initiated two decades of military dictatorship in Brazil.

And Eliza later told the New York Times that he'd been forced out due to suspicions he'd had communist sympathies or because he'd been overheard speaking in Russian to President Tito of Yugoslavia.

So Aike and his six siblings had a turbulent, but let's face it, pretty privileged childhood.

The family relocated for a time to West Germany before Eliza would eventually be invited back to serve once again as Vale's president in 1979.

Aike's mother, Jutta, was actually from Germany.

She actually came from Hamburg and she had big ambitions for all her children.

In fact, she would actually challenge them to outdo the success of their father.

What could possibly go wrong, Tiger Mum?

Just an archetype or tiger mum.

It's not enough to flee from a military dictatorship.

You've got to put the pressure onto your kids too.

Exhibit A, she would force Aike, who suffered from asthma, to swim in an outdoor pool on cold days to build up his resilience.

And this was when the family were in Germany rather than Brazil.

And Aike set out to follow in his father's footsteps and get into mining.

He studied metallurgy at university in Germany.

And like many of our billionaires, he also started his first business ventures early early on.

Yep he was selling insurance policies from door to door when he was a student.

In interviews Aike has claimed that he had to work at university just to keep up with his peers.

However, journalist Alex Quadros, whose book Brazilian Heirs dug a little bit into Aike's story, found that he only really worked after he'd spent all of the generous allowance he got from his parents.

The book also revealed that Aike got involved with some far more lucrative business ventures quite early on.

So when he was back in Brazil for a holiday, he set up deals with diamond miners to transport their goods to jewelers in Europe.

So by dint of this, he'd got some useful contacts by 1979.

When he read an article about a gold rush in the Amazon, the 22-year-old Aike saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in this new gold rush.

So he dropped out of his university and headed back to Brazil.

But, you know, understandably, Aike has said that his father was angry he quit school.

His mother, however, supported him because good old Jutta thought Aikey had the golden touch.

In fact, she nicknamed him Goldercell after a donkey which drops gold from its mouth in a Grim Brothers fairy tale.

And she wasn't the only one with faith in her young son.

He also managed to convince two of his jeweler contacts to front him half a million dollars to buy into gold mines in the rainforest.

Now, I have to say, I don't know if I would trust a university dropout with a cool half-here's half a million dollars.

What is very striking about this, and it makes me think about lots of our billionaires, is that it's that salesman idea that salesperson idea like getting people to part with money to invest in you in a way most of our billionaires have been brilliant salespeople and actually sometimes when you look at their stories they're not so good at you know doing the things that people typically think billionaires do inventing amazing products creating great ip they're just good at talking to people and getting them to part ways of money i mean look at someone like the crypto king and convicted criminal sam bankman freed yeah yeah.

So raising that money, getting people to say, okay, here's some money, off you go.

And off he went.

He used the cash to set up a Rio office where he would work and he hired a partner to undertake the dangerous task of going into the rainforest to set up deals with local miners.

So these are small-scale, often illegally operating prospectors who work in the Amazon.

They're called garimperos.

Batista has explained that the garimperos do the hardest part of the job.

They have to find rich new claims and that they saved him a lot of time and money in looking for them himself.

He's also said the logistics of gold mining in the inhospitable rainforest are mind-boggling and it's easy to get your fingers burnt and that's why most multinationals in his words have been scared away.

This reminds me of when in 19 I think 11 a guy called Hiram Bingham supposedly discovered Machu Picchu, this kind of lost city of the Incas, right?

Whatever.

And actually it turns out they'll be like, oh yeah, we've known it's been there for years.

These local folks know the layer of the land so well.

They've had centuries in a way to culturally pass down where these finds are.

And so why not tap into that cultural resource?

And also the lack of large-scale competition provided Batista with this golden opportunity that he and his partner capitalised on.

They turned their initial half a million dollar investment into 800,000.

But then Batista's partner just disappeared.

Batista didn't know if he had run off all the money or had been murdered for it.

The end result was kind of the same.

Batista never saw him or that money ever again.

So Aike could have been in serious trouble with his investors.

But rather than them demanding their money back, Aikey somehow convinced the jewellers to give him another half a million to start all over again.

He said it's because they believed in his capacity for execution, but he also admits that they knew who his father was.

Don't forget that, like a bit of a gold seam running through this story.

Journalist Malu Gaspar, who wrote a book about Batista, has a completely different version of these events.

She claims Ike secretly mortgaged his family's apartment in Brussels to raise the money.

Already we're kind of hitting some what you might call inconsistencies in this story.

Not everyone's reading from the same hymn sheet there on this story.

However, this all happened.

Batista was back in business and there was still plenty of gold to be mined and the price of gold was soaring.

So it went from trading at $150 a troy ounce to $850.

And this time around, Batista himself headed into the rainforest to make these deals.

And he actually proved pretty good at dealing with those garimperos.

And this was unusual, but Batista would pay in local currency, which meant locals got better rates than they were used to.

But they were not so good that Batista himself lost out on this deal.

In fact, one man who did business with him said that Aiku would go into the jungle and show village chiefs a 10-day-old newspaper and say, look, here's the price of gold.

Of course, the price in the meantime had gone up and would rise even more by the time he sold it on in Rio.

Also, in the relative lawlessness of the jungle is also quite a risky business.

So he's often told journalists a story about how one trip in the rainforest went awry when he went to collect some cash he'd lent to a local miner.

The man refused to pay, they got into an argument, Batista was hurling insults at him and eventually the man shot him in the back.

He survived.

Batista still has a scar to prove it, but he told the New York Times that he was far enough away that the impact wasn't deadly.

That same report says that his two bodyguards later told him they'd killed the miners.

This is movie stuff.

So, listen, it's a dark time, it's a dangerous place, but for Batista, the risks seemed worth it because in 1980, aged all of 24 years old, Batista made six million dollars.

So, he is officially a millionaire and he immediately treats himself right, you would, to a luxury sports cutter, Porsche 928, paying with cash.

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It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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So how do we go from a million to a billion?

So the millionaire, Batista, next bought something even more expensive than that, Porsche.

He teamed up with one of his brothers and a friend to buy a gold mine in the north of the Brazilian state of Matogroso,

pretty much right in the middle of Brazil.

Also in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, where at the time gold was only mined by panning in rivers with picks and shovels, by Garimperos sourcing gold from rubble, literally by hand, old school.

Yeah, proper American Wild West stuff.

But Batista wasn't happy with that.

He planned to do something completely new in the region.

He wanted to bring modern equipment in, modern technology, and set up the rainforest's first mechanized mine.

Yeah, but there were reasons this had never been done before.

Firstly, getting equipment like bulldozers into the rainforest was a pretty monumental task.

It had to be disassembled in the nearest city about 60 miles away, loaded onto an aeroplane, small enough to land in the forest before being reassembled at the site.

Also, some extreme weather conditions, high rates of malaria in the region, a hostile working environment.

Have you ever been to the Amazon Simon?

I have.

Have you?

I have, yeah.

I remember staying in a little lodge in the Amazon and being thrilled by the sounds at night because it sounded like all of life was there.

I mean I have to say I would love to go but I don't think I would like to work in the heat of the jungle.

And you know not everything went to plan in the rainforest.

By 1983 he'd spent most of the money he'd earned and his six million was reduced to just $300,000.

Batista has joked he should have just gone to the beach instead.

But once everything was in place for this mechanized mine, things quickly turned around.

He adds that he was helped by luck.

He said, the claims I found were so rich I'd call them idiot-proof.

They forgave every mistake I made.

And he was soon selling a million dollars worth of gold every month from that one mine.

But you don't become a billionaire, as we know, by selling a million a month.

Quick reminder about how much a billionaires, even if that was all profit, it would take 80 years at a million a month to amass a billion.

And Batista had ambitions to make that kind of money, so he set about investing and expanding expanding his business empire.

That's right.

He teamed up with some Canadian investors to create a new mining company.

Now originally called Treasure Valley Explorations, very Indiana Jones of them.

Batista soon had the name changed to just TVX.

And like another very famous billionaire you will have heard of, Batista loves the letter X.

In fact, he's used it in the name of most of his companies because he says it symbolizes multiple wealth.

It's true that because actually in the investing world people talk about 10x, 5x.

it means i've made 10 times the money i put in i've made five times the money in so x is definitely one of those kind of little figures of speech that people use in how to make big money very very quickly symbol yeah so tvx pursues this strategy of aggressively buying up mining rights in brazil in places where the guarimperos have quite literally been scratching the surface where he's got the big diggers to get underneath it.

So they built mechanized mines and successfully uncovered very deep seams of gold.

But then Batista suggested that they should buy a mine further away in Chile, but his TVX partners thought he was mad.

So this mine was 100 miles from any water or power.

It was also tied up in lawsuits from locals who were claiming that they had the right to mine that land.

But Batista was so sure that it was worth something, he chucked in $15 million of his own money to fight the lawsuits and buy the mine.

And then he combined his own holdings with the rest of TVX, making him the largest shareholder and most powerful person in the company.

And then in 1988 he had a stroke of luck.

Brazil changed the rules for mining in a way that favoured TVX.

Congress restricted exploitation of the country's minerals only to companies with significant Brazilian ownership.

So basically if you're Brazilian you get first dibs.

Batista's share of TVX was 41%.

That complied, that passed those particular rules.

Many other companies who had been working in the region did not.

So they were out, he was in, and that enabled more expansion for TVX.

And by 1989, by which time Batista is 32, his company was responsible for 7% of all the gold being extracted in Brazil.

Profit margins are very healthy, too.

Revenues of 20 million gave him 13 million in profit.

And those figures are actually going up with the gold price every year.

So this is the start of the 90s.

Batista is very rich and he is living the high life in Rio.

I mean, just the words high life in Rio.

High life in Rio.

I'm there.

Really, they just do conjure up an image.

and you know he's exactly what you would imagine a stereotype of a Brazilianaire who made his money from gold would be he's got sports cars he's got speedboats he takes part in speedboat races actually he was crowned world power boat champion in 1990 in the super boat category he said I wanted to be a world champion at something but I couldn't run 100 meters against Ben Johnson so the only way I was going to be a champion was to have some engines behind me which I personally think is quite honest of him.

It is honest of him.

And as you'd expect, all this socializing all this high life in rio leads to some personal engagements in fact he got engaged to an upper-class rio socialite in january 1991 the couple have this lavish church wedding but then days before they've gone through with the civil ceremony the inking it in law he elopes with his girlfriend now his girlfriend is a famous carnival queen and playboy magazine cover star called luma de oliviera what a great name i mean palma she's already pregnant by the way, with Aikey's first son.

They'd met when she presented him with a prize after a speedboat race.

So Batista got his first wedding anode, and four months later, he marries Di Oliviera.

And the couple would have two sons together in a marriage that lasted 13 years.

So pretty good going.

In that time, thanks to Batista's wealth and her public profile, so they become the celebrity couple.

He becomes increasingly known in his country for this really outrageously rich lifestyle in a country where, you know, in Brazil, the wealthy are a little bit more reserved, they're a little bit more circumspect about climate change.

Well, because there's the inequality of the super rich and the super poor is really quite stark in Brazil.

And so I think the rich do tend to sort of keep quite a low profile to not exacerbate that obvious and jarring sense of inequality.

Right.

In the early years, his marriage and his business are going pretty well.

By 1996, TVX's market value is $1.8 billion.

But then, in the late 90s, his golden touch deserts him.

He had pushed for more international expansion.

He bought mines in Greece and in Russia.

He promised to double the output, saying that shareholders could shoot him if he failed.

This was someone who's already been shot, remember.

Unfortunately, however, those Greek mines proved to be a bit of a disaster.

Locos protested, and then, worst of all, ancient ruins were discovered at the site.

So, clearly, Midas was not with him at the time.

Batista poured TVX's money into his foreign ventures to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars, but you know, it just wasn't working out for him.

And then there was a drop in the value of gold.

That meant by 2001, the value of TVX's shared had plummeted by 96%.

That is a lot.

He was forced to resign as chairman and CEO, and eventually he just sold off his stock.

That wasn't his only bad bet.

There were others, too.

He sank $30 million into a Jeep factory that closed, $70 million into an expression delivery company that failed, $10 million into a beauty business, which was apparently for his wife to run.

He invested in the pager business for our younger listeners, a pager, something where you get a little bleep and then you call someone back on a different line.

But this is exactly the time that people stopped using them and started to get cell phones instead.

So none of these ventures came to anything, and Batista lost about $175 million.

And again, there's so many points at this story where I think lesser mortals like myself would have tapped out, but he still had that billionaire ambition.

And Batista's about to get even richer by returning to the thing that made him rich in the first place, mining.

Batista planned a group of companies that would all basically feed and support each other like this ecosystem.

The overall conglomerate was called EBX.

And then there was a mining fall called MMX that would dig for iron ore.

The digging would be powered by Batista's energy company called MPX.

And the ore would be shipped to China on boats from his shipbuilding firm, OSX.

You know, when we said that he liked the letter X, we weren't kidding.

Oh, and also, by the way, everything would be all out of a superport to be built by a logistics firm, LLX.

So that port was actually probably the most ambitious part of the whole thing.

It would be bigger than Manhattan to accommodate 400,000-ton freight ships.

He said it would be like the Rotterdam of the tropics.

And actually, Batista had identified what Brazil's economy needed.

He understood the country had abundant minerals, as we've seen to mine, but had some pretty patchy infrastructure.

So you needed new roads, refineries, ports to take advantage of the nation's rich potential.

And at this point, there would be queues of ships, for example, idling off Rio's beaches, waiting to dock in the overfilled, congested port.

So he was really trying to offer a solution to every aspect of the mining industry.

And once again, he was able to convince investors to fund him.

He found even more Canadian partners, including the Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund.

And you know, this is in spite of a reputation for bad news, particularly in Canada.

A magazine called Canadian Business had actually run a feature about his TVX failures entitled Mayhem Man in 1999.

So even though he's getting some bad publicity as a result of these failed ventures, he's still able to talk people into parting ways with their money.

And the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund may sound quite obscure.

Yes.

But it's actually a massive global infrastructure investor.

It's invested in loads of stuff in the UK, for example.

Those Ontario teachers, they get everywhere when it comes to investing in infrastructure.

And IKEA was soon floating some of his subsidiaries on the stock market to raise more cash.

MMX raised $470 million in 2006 from its initial public offerings, share sale, to the public.

And he secured over $1 billion from Brazil's state-owned development bank and various Brazilian private banks.

So it was all systems go.

In 2006, Batista was telling the press the project was, in his words, idiot-proof.

He shouldn't keep saying that.

He really should.

He has this habit of saying things like, shoot me if it all goes wrong.

It's idiot proof.

This is idiot proof.

You know, he clearly has a way of doing it.

He ends up getting shot and ends up.

That turns out it's not idiot proof.

Well, spoiler alert, because it's all going to go slightly awry, but we'll get there.

So that year, the opulent Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio hosted this cocktail event paid for by those Ontario teachers and their pension fund, where Batista made another audacious claim.

He was going to be the world's richest man.

And while most of us would hear this and think, oh, sounds a bit like he's kind of trying trying to live it a little bit too large, a vice president of the Pension Fund was quoted saying, the way he says it, it doesn't sound crazy.

Yeah, it's a sort of strange version of charisma, I suppose, isn't it?

Anyway, in 2007, Batista launched what he would call the cash cow of the EBX group, the oil and gas company OGX.

Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, was by then one of the largest companies in the world.

Brazil was outstripping even Norway in oil production.

But Petrobras wasn't focused on shareholders.

It put employment before profits.

As a state-owned thing, it had a different mandate in terms of employment.

So Batista founded OGX to do kind of the opposite.

He called it a private Petrobras and he hired ex-Petrobras employees to start his new firm.

Now, in order to fund that firm, OGX, Batista reportedly used $500 million of his own money and another 500 from the Ontario Pension Fund.

And then a few months after the launch of OGX, Petrobras announces the discovery of three large offshore deep water oil fields.

These were the biggest find in the Americas since the 1970s.

And the government announced that these new oil fields were going to go off to auction.

And he quickly managed to raise $1 billion from investors to put in a bid.

This is pretty new territory for this young fledging company, which still had no active operations.

And deep water oil fields way out at sea were a risky new thing in the oil industry.

Some of the team who had discovered the deep water oil fields were actually now working at OGX so they did actually have a bit of an advantage.

They had some of the people who originally found them working for them.

He was later accused of actually poaching Petro Brass's stuff so he could gain that advantage.

He claimed they had all just retired, it was all fine.

He just hired them afterwards and gotten them out of retirement.

So this big auction of oil rights was happening in November 2007.

Batista was confident of his bids, even when the government removed many of the deepwater fields due to worries they were giving away state assets and they swapped some of those water ones for shallow water fields.

Now, that led to big US companies like Chevron and Exxon pulling out of the auction.

But Batista, again, was reassuring his investors.

The shallow water fields, he said, were easier and cheaper to extract oil from.

So the way was clear for OGX.

So there's a bidding war for some of these fields, and each of the totals which Batista submitted as a bid ended in 63 cents because that was his lucky number.

And his luck was in.

He had 21 successful bids.

In total, Batista spent nearly $1 billion for these offshore oil blocks.

So by this point, Batista is definitely a billionaire.

And in fact, the American financial magazine Forbes included him on their billionaire list for the first time in March 2008.

Yep, they estimated his wealth at 6.6 billion.

That made him Brazil's third richest man.

So he's officially a billionaire.

And having fulfilled his ambition to be one, it seems that he was genuine about wanting to be the richest man in the world.

He actually told an interviewer in 2008, I want to surpass Bill Gates in five years.

By this time, Batista was amicably divorced from his first wife.

They lived in mansions next door to each other, so their two sons' lives wouldn't be too disrupted.

And he was making more headlines with a new girlfriend, a businesswoman who would go on to become his third wife and have his third son.

And he was becoming increasingly eccentric and outrageous.

So he notoriously had a Mercedes-Benz sports car parked in the living room of his real mansion.

That must have been quite difficult for him to pull out.

And this was the point when he had the habit of attending meetings hooked up to an IV drip of anti-aging vitamins.

Feels like a David Lynch film, was there?

Yeah, as you wheel in the person for the meeting hooked up to a drip.

Yeah, with a Brazilian flag hanging off it.

But despite this eccentricity, his wealth was skyrocketing.

In June 2008, OGX raised $3.6 billion from an IPO, the third largest in Brazil's history.

By 2010, he was the richest man in Brazil.

In 2012, he reached the peak of his wealth as the seventh richest person in the world.

He hadn't quite reached his goal of surpassing Bill Gates, but he was worth a cool $30 billion.

And you know, things were looking good.

So in 2012, Wells in one of his oil fields finally started pumping oil.

So that lengthy process of extracting oil had actually seen his shares dip.

So this was a really big moment and batista wanted to bask in that success some journalists however suggested it was all down to his father and he was incredulous there was a forbes interview in 2012 where he said all my businesses started from zero my father was a problem for me because he never let me near valet i wasn't allowed because he was afraid of a conflict of interest i'm the one who made my own connections my dad doesn't believe in taking risks Ouch.

Yeah, this is really interesting, isn't it?

Because every time he's successful, people saying, oh, well, you came from money, it's your dad.

And that must have driven him absolutely crackers.

Yeah, and also just to point out that his dad wasn't in the ground by then.

You know, he was still alive when Batista was making these comments.

He was like actually 78.

So, you know, probably still reading the papers.

It would have made for a very awkward Christmas conversation, I think.

But nevertheless, this was Batista's peak moment, and he was determined to enjoy it.

it made lots of very public displays of generosity.

He spent over $12 million financing Rio's Olympic committee ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games.

And he bought Brazilian footballer Ronaldo's shirt for over half a million dollars at a benefit auction.

So Batista was also spending money on other charities.

He pledged $7 million to Madonna's Success for Kids charity, $114 million to renovate an architectural landmark hotel in Rio.

He also opened a high-end Chinese restaurant there.

He also paid for police vehicles in poor neighborhoods.

He funded a cleanup of a popular local lagoon.

He's really kind of making a splash.

Yeah,

All is going well, but everything was about to come crashing down.

By June 2012, it became clear from OGX financial statements that while a lot of money was being spent on drilling, they weren't finding that much oil.

So OGX lowered their targets for two offshore wells from 20,000 barrels a day to about 5,000.

That instantly knocked $3.4 billion off its shares in a single day.

Batista began to default on loans.

The share price of his other companies quickly began to fall too.

Yeah, it's all good saying drill, baby, drill, but not so much if you can't actually drill for oil.

So once one part of that empire started crashing down, it all came down.

And that's that's quite interesting because you remember when we were talking about he wanted to set up this network of companies that all feed off and support each other.

That's great when things are going well, but when one bit of it starts failing, the dominoes start toppling.

Right, the Jenga Tower starts wobbling.

So Sergio Leo, the author of a biography of Batista, said his projects made sense at the time, big oil, and then the big port to move it and the logistics companies.

But like you say, Simon, each company was linked to the success of the other.

And the moment OGX failed, it all went down like a house of cards.

House of cards, Jenga, Domino's.

Pick your analogy.

I think we know what we're talking about.

At the same time as all this was going on, Batista's son, Thor was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after driving into an 86-year-old cyclist and killing him.

Globo newspaper alleged Thor had committed several previous traffic violations, including for speeding.

So Batista took to Twitter to defend his son, saying the cyclist had actually swerved into the road.

And in one interview, Batista said, The victim is obviously the person who passed away, but Thor's a victim too, isn't he?

So, this is a very difficult time for Iike Batista.

He was forced to halt a planned sale of shares of a gold mining company he called AUX.

Then he started to sell off whatever he could.

The Ontario Teachers Fund sold their EBX shares before the price really dropped, but many other shareholders were hit very hard.

In October 2013, OGX declared bankruptcy, and Batista fell off the Forbes billionaire list, much, I imagine, to his chagrin.

He actually claimed he still had one billion.

He was like, hey guys, you know, I'm still a billionaire.

I'm still here.

He said, my projects are live and will become benchmarks.

But one economist and former securities trader who lost 40% of his savings investing in Batista told the Wall Street Journal it was a bubble scam.

He added, I can deal with losing the money because I've lost money before.

What eats at me is this feeling of being robbed.

Ouch.

And that anger would soon enough find an outlet.

It wasn't long until the courts got involved.

In 2014, Batista went to court, accused of manipulating market charges in the sales of shares of two of his companies, which is a form of insider trading.

And that case was thrown into disarray, really, when the judge in the case was suspended after he was caught driving around in one of Batista's cars.

The Porsche had been impounded on the judge's orders.

He claimed he was taking it home as the police had no appropriate place to park it.

it.

Quite the excuse, I would say.

Come off it.

Well, then there was another case in 2015.

Batista was fined close to $440,000 for failing to provide shareholders with timely information.

But then, even more serious charges arrived in January of 2017.

Yeah, much more serious.

This was all part of a groundbreaking anti-corruption probe in Brazil called Operation Car Wash.

It had begun by looking into allegations that executives at Petrobras, remember that big state-owned oil company, had accepted bribes, but it soon spiraled into a seven-year investigation that looked at over 80 politicians and members of the business elite.

Now, when Batista got wind that he was caught up in Operation Car Wash, he absconded.

The Brazilian police had to actually tap into Pol to track him down.

He was eventually arrested, and then he was charged with paying bribes of $16 million to a former state.

governor and he was placed under house arrest.

And in 2018, he was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

The judge said his crimes caused deep scars in the trust of investors and entrepreneurs who, in the recent past, saw Brazil as a good investment option.

Then in 2019, Batista was sentenced to eight years and seven months in the retrial of the insider trading case the Porsche driving judge had been suspended from.

So really a big fall from grace for Batista.

But if you're asking yourself, did this man spend decades in jail?

The answer is no.

By the end of 2019, Batista had not spent time in prison at all.

And then in 2020, Batista entered into a plea bargain with Brazilian authorities, under which he would serve just four years in prison and surrender $160 million of assets, as well as collaborating with prosecutors.

In the end, he did actually go to prison, but only for about three months, with much of his time under house arrest, which counted towards his sentence.

And as we speak in 2025, Batista is back in business, baby.

He's announced he secured $500,000 for a new sugarcane business venture and the press release included the line like a phoenix i rise again smarter stronger and ready to build my greatest empire yet and we eagerly await that but in the meantime from the story so far let us judge him we take our billionaires and we judge them on a variety of categories including wealth their philanthropy their power and even their villainy so let's start zing with wealth well he's once the world's seventh richest person at one point he had ambitions to outstrip Bill Gates.

I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon.

He is not a billionaire anymore, however.

So I would say he scores quite lowly on this.

I don't agree with that this time because I think that he was Brazil's richest person at one point.

You know, obviously Brazil has become in the last 20 years, 30 years, an economic, an emerging economic superpower, but it wasn't back then.

And so to get in the top 10 of richest people in the world, I think in absolute terms, that would give him, for me, an eight.

But we also look at how far they've come in terms of like where they started.

Yes.

And it was, it hounded him and bothered him his entire life that people kept referring to the fact that he was that

he was a bit of a nepo baby.

And so, and you know, some of his contacts and the way he was able to raise money for his ventures were by dint of the fact that his father was a very influential executive.

So I'm going to take three points off from eight to five.

But

as you said, the high life in Rio.

Yeah.

The beauty queen.

Sports car parked in their living room.

Arriving meetings with an intravenous drip, like he's some kind of rock star.

Girlfriends on the

playboy, Luma de Oliveira.

Kind of like the Brazilian Austin Powers at this point, isn't he?

So I'm going to upgrade him one point.

Having downgraded him three, I'm going to upgrade him another one.

So I'm going to give him a six.

Right.

We've swung towards a higher score.

Yes.

I would actually give him a seven because we've profiled a lot of billionaires who like to live at large.

You know, parties of Jay-Z and Beyond, say, how much

deliver beer on your golf course.

Exactly.

But I have to say that there's just something about the image of arriving for meetings with Ivy Drips.

Covered with the Brazilian flag.

It's amazing.

It really.

So I think.

I will give him seven out of ten though.

Okay, so seven for you, six for me.

Let's talk about villainy.

What have they done to get there I mean he has done it quite a lot yeah on his journey hasn't he I mean inside the trading bribes sentenced to jail you know 16 million dollars in bribes he was accused of paying but also the you know the mining industry in Brazil it's a tricky business it's a dirty business and sometimes it's a corrupt business so for villainy I'm gonna give him a solid seven in this one I feel like I have to give him slightly higher because even though many of our billionaires have done unsavory things in the process of getting their wealth, very few of them have actually been convicted or sentenced to prison.

So I think eight out of ten for them.

Seven for me, eight for you.

Giving back philanthropy, what's he done there?

So in 2010, he told journalists he actually wanted to be the biggest philanthropist in the world.

However, a former exec in EBX, which is that holding company, claims that a lot of donations were from OGX and other companies, not actually from Batista's own pocket.

In the words of that person, he didn't do anything with his own money.

He spent other people's.

And what about the Madonna charity?

Because he pledged, what, $7 million?

Yeah, he only ended up giving half a million.

That is pretty bad.

Sounds like he promises more than he delivers.

Yes, and I think you'll probably see that in quite a lot of his business journey.

Yeah.

Giving back.

He was the richest man in Brazil at one time, $30 billion.

I'm going to give him a two.

Yeah, I'm going to give him a two out of ten.

In a way, it's actually worse when you claim you want to be a philanthropist and then you under deliver than if you just never say you want to give any money back at all.

I feel like that's worse.

Yeah, how right you are.

Okay, so two each on giving back.

Power and legacy.

In some ways, his

conspicuousness as a kind of rich, influential, lavish lifestyle person with a father who was well connected in the mining industry was kind of a magnet for some of the anti-corruption stuff that happened in Brazil, or some say anyway.

Right.

He was kind of an outlier in how obviously he was spending that wealth and living that lifestyle.

There's good reasons for that, right?

Because you basically put a target on your back because people start looking at you and thinking, wait a second, where's all this money come from?

Yeah, I remember being in Brazil, I think in the early 2000s.

He was sort of known and he was sort of an emerging person, but he was also a bit of a kind of figure of fun, a bit of a chancel.

So in terms of power and legacy, I would say

low, actually.

I mean, if you're still the richest person in Brazil, you can probably pick up the phone to anyone.

But if you look at now, you know, he's not even a billionaire.

I'm going to give him a

on power, you know, one, on legacy three, because he's kind of a famous person.

He's sort of a famous chancer.

So

combined a two.

Right.

It's interesting because I would say maybe

slightly more.

I feel like at the height of his fame, he could probably pick up the phone and talk anybody into giving him a bit of money.

Yeah, that's probably true.

So I think I'm going to go slightly higher and give him a three out of ten.

I certainly raised the profile of Brazil as an emerging economic superpower.

So maybe I'll upgrade him to a three.

Yeah, ironically, I feel like maybe it is that success that actually, you know, caused Brazil to clean up its act and root out corruption.

Yeah.

So, good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I think because he was literally convicted of crimes, he has to be a bad billionaire.

I'm going to hand this one to the judges.

I agree.

So I'm going to say, I'm so sorry, IKEA Batista.

In our view, you are a bad billionaire.

And not just our view, the view of the courts of Brazil.

So that's what we think.

But what do you think?

How would you judge IKEA Batista or any of the other billionaires we've covered?

We want to hear from you.

So email goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176.

One more time, that is goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or 001-917-686-1176.

Don't forget to include your name and where you're based, and we might feature your message on a future episode.

You can tell us what you think of any of the billionaires we've covered, from Marcus Person and James Dyson to Selena Gomez and Oprah Winfrey.

Or let us know what you think about billionaires in general.

Are they a force for good or bad in the world?

And that is it for season three of Good Bad Billionaire.

But we will be back after a very short break with season four, a very special set of episodes looking at some of the dead billionaires who shaped American industry.

First up will be the very first billionaire, John D.

Rockefeller.

So make sure you're subscribed to get that episode as soon as it drops.

Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast.

It's produced by Mark Ward with additional production by Tamsin Curry.

Paul Smith is the editor and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

For the BBC World Service, the commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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