Jorge Paulo Lemann

Jorge Paulo Lemann was born on August 26, 1939, in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Paul Lemann, a Swiss immigrant who started the dairy company Leco, died in a bus accident when Lemann was 14. His mother, Anna Yvette Truebner, was Brazilian of Swiss descent. As a child, Lemann wanted to be an inventor and looked up to Thomas Edison, though the machines he built usually failed. He attended the American School of Rio de Janeiro and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1960. He disliked his time there, calling his first year “horrible” due to the cold, the workload, and missing home. After setting off fireworks on the last day of freshman year, he was reprimanded and considered dropping out but stayed.

Lemann was a strong tennis player in his youth. He won the Brazilian national championship five times, played in the Davis Cup for both Switzerland and Brazil, and competed at Wimbledon in 1962.

After graduating, he worked as a trainee at Credit Suisse in Geneva from 1961 to 1962. In 1966, his first equity investment—a 2% stake in a lending company called Invesco—ended in bankruptcy. In 1971, he founded the investment bank Banco Garantia; Carlos Alberto Sicupira joined in 1972 and Marcel Herrmann Telles in 1973. Despite a market crash weeks later, the bank grew into one of Brazil’s most respected firms, sometimes called “a Brazilian version of Goldman Sachs.” In 1998, following the Asian financial crisis, they sold Banco Garantia to Credit Suisse First Boston for $675 million. Lemann and his partners later controlled AB InBev as board members. He served on the board of Companhia Cervejaria Brahma from 1990 to 2001.

Through GP Investimentos, a private equity firm he and his partners founded, they bought two Brazilian breweries—Brahma and Companhia Antarctica Paulista—which merged into AmBev. By 2004, AmBev controlled 65% of Brazil’s beer market and nearly 80% of Argentina’s, with monopolies in Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia. In 2004, AmBev merged with Belgium’s Interbrew to form InBev, whose stock rose 40% in 2005. In 2008, InBev bought Anheuser-Busch for $46 billion, creating the world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and cementing Lemann’s reputation as a “King” of beer.

Lemann co-founded 3G Capital, which owns Burger King, Tim Hortons, Anheuser-Busch, and Heinz.