Eike Batista, the Man Who Lost $25 Billion in One Year

A year ago, Eike Batista was Brazil’s richest man, and his goal of climbing to No. 1 in the world seemed within reach. After founding five publicly traded natural-resource companies in six years, he’d just sold a stake in his EBX Group conglomerate that valued his holdings at $34.5 billion. His companies had yet to turn a profit, so the deal, struck with an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, was mainly a testament to Batista’s vision: an integrated empire of companies, shipping oil and iron ore to China from a port he was building near Rio de Janeiro. “I think Eike is a special kind of entrepreneur,” said Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff during a visit to the port project in April. “He’s a person who comes up with extremely ambitious dreams and then seeks to fulfill them.”

Today, Batista’s empire is under siege. His port, which he said would be the third-largest in the world, is still under construction, just one of many delayed projects and missed production targets. That, together with a 34 percent decline in the price of oil since 2008, has battered his companies’ share prices and knocked $25 billion off his net worth, more than the entire fortune of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. “People were basically investing in a PowerPoint presentation,” says Ed Kuczma, an emerging-markets analyst at Van Eck Associates, which holds shares in Batista’s companies. “He’s very charismatic. I’ve seen him on roadshows and he definitely lightens up a room when he walks in. But he doesn’t have the credibility he used to.”