Jorge Lemann is behind some of America's most iconic consumer brands.
The Brazilian billionaire's investment company 3G Capital has invested in or backed takeovers of Kraft, Heinz, Burger King and Anheuser Busch.
Now, Anheuser Busch InBev –which counts Lemann among its controlling shareholders – has sealed a deal to merge with SABMiller.
The deal puts a huge chunk of the world's beer market in the hands of one company.
AB Inbev owns Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois and Becks, among others. SABMiller owns Fosters, Blue Moon, Grolsch and Peroni.
As part of the deal announced Wednesday November 11, SABMiller will sell its stake in US joint venture MillerCoors and the global rights to the Miller Brand in a bid to get the deal past anti-trust regulators.
Combinations of large consumer companies are Lemann's signature: 3G created the world's fifth-largest food company by investing $10 billion into a merger of Kraft and Heinz, and engineered a fast-food giant after buying Burger King in 2010 for $3.3 billion and putting it together with Tim Hortons for another $11.3 billion.
"I think above all you must always be building something," he says in this video interview with Falconi Consultants posted on YouTube last year. "We always want to arrive somewhere, to improve, and we are always trying to get there by making things better around us... these are the things that guide me."
AB InBev itself is a company that took decades, and billions in acquisitions, to build — the largest of which was the $52 billion purchase of Anheuser Busch in 2008.
The Harvard graduate has gone from journalist to national tennis champion to banker and now billionaire investor with a net worth of over $24 billion, according to Bloomberg. Here's his story:
This is an updated version of a article published earlier this month about Jorge Lemann.
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Lemann was born in Rio de Janeiro, 1939. His father was a Swiss businessman who immigrated to Brazil in the 1920s. His family had been Swiss cheese merchants for over 300 years.
His mother was from a family of cocoa merchants in Bahia, who were more ambitious, Lemann said during the interview with Falconi. That was where he got his drive.
At 17, he left Brazil to attend Harvard, earning his bachelor's degree in economics in 1961. At first, he didn't like it there and didn't do well— he loved the beaches of Brazil. But his mother stopped him from leaving Harvard to become a surfer or a tennis player.
Now he has a great relationship with Harvard, setting up scholarships for Brazilian students.
Harvard even recommended that he take a year-long break from school because he wasn't mature enough. Instead, Lemann finished school in three years by interviewing students, professors, and looking at old tests before choosing a class. He was 20 when he graduated.
Though now, he regrets not taking more advantage of the faculty at Harvard, for example speaking with Henry Kissinger or Paul Samuelson, according to a speech Lemann made to his foundation, Estudar, translated by Forbes.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider