The Empty Datebook
In April 2017, at the Brazil Conference hosted at Harvard and MIT,
Warren Buffett sat onstage beside a lean, silver-haired man twelve years his junior and told a story about time. It went like this: Years earlier, at a Gillette board meeting, Jorge Paulo Lemann had confided to Buffett that he was selling his bank. Buffett asked if he was happy. Lemann said he was — because he didn't want to be somebody running a Goldman Sachs. He'd much rather be like Buffett. Why? "You have better control of your time, you have a better sense of humor, and you're much richer."
Buffett, who rarely lets a compliment pass without returning it in some unexpected denomination, responded by pulling out a small appointment book — his calendar — and leafing through it. Page after page: blank. "Look at how rich I am," he said. "I don't have much to do. I only do what I like and I only do it with my friends. So I'm very, very rich."
Lemann told the audience his wife still complained: How come you don't have as much time as Warren?
The anecdote has the shape of a parable — the two richest men in any room, one Brazilian and one American, defining wealth not by what they've accumulated but by what they've declined to schedule. But the joke carried a blade. By the time Lemann retold it onstage, in the spring of 2017, his datebook was anything but empty. He and his partners were orchestrating simultaneous campaigns across the global consumer-goods industry: running the world's largest beer company, integrating Kraft with Heinz, managing Burger King and Tim Hortons through Restaurant Brands International, and — most audaciously — preparing a $147 billion bid for Unilever that would collapse within days of becoming public knowledge. Time, love, and Heinz ketchup — the things, Buffett might say, that money can buy but not quite control.
What is Jorge Paulo Lemann? He has been called Brazil's richest man, a terrified dinosaur, the Goldman Sachs of Rio de Janeiro incarnated as a single human being, and — by the workers whose plants his companies closed — something considerably less flattering. He is a Swiss-Brazilian who grew up on Copacabana, played tennis at Wimbledon, set off fireworks in Harvard Yard, was nearly expelled, finished his degree in three years instead of four, built an investment bank that Credit Suisse would buy for $675 million, assembled the largest beer company on the planet through a chain of mergers spanning four decades and five continents, and then, in the second act, turned to the American pantry — ketchup, mac and cheese, Velveeta, Oscar Mayer, Maxwell House — and tried to do it all over again. The second act did not go as well as the first. This is the more interesting story.
By the Numbers
The 3G Empire
$21.1BEstimated net worth (Bloomberg, 2024)
$52BInBev acquisition of Anheuser-Busch (2008)
$28BHeinz acquisition value including debt (2013)
~$63BKraft-Heinz merger value (2015)
$15BKraft Heinz goodwill write-down (2019)
$675MCredit Suisse acquisition of Banco Garantia (1998)
3,000+Scholarships funded by the Lemann Foundation
The Cheese Merchant's Son
Jorge Paulo Lemann was born on August 26, 1939, in Rio de Janeiro, into a household that was Brazilian by latitude and Swiss by temperament. His father, a Swiss immigrant, had come to Brazil to run a dairy business — cheese, of all things, which gives the later ketchup and beer empire a certain symmetry. His mother was Brazilian, connected to the cocoa trade. The family occupied a social stratum common to a certain kind of Latin American immigrant household: comfortable enough to afford ambition, cosmopolitan enough to look beyond national borders, but not so established that anything was guaranteed.
The boy grew up on the beach. Rio in the 1940s and 1950s was a city of extravagant natural beauty and casual danger — the surf at Copacabana could kill you as easily as delight you — and Lemann took to the waves with the kind of recklessness that would later characterize his approach to leveraged buyouts. A story, told and retold in Brazilian business circles, holds that as a teenager he rode a thirty-foot storm wave that should have drowned him and emerged with a conviction that risk was the price of being alive. Whether the wave was really thirty feet is beside the point. The point is that Lemann believed it was, and that the lesson he extracted — you cannot learn to take risks except by practicing, practicing — became the closest thing he had to a personal philosophy.
He was good at tennis. Very good. Five-time Brazilian national champion. He competed at Wimbledon. He played Davis Cup for Brazil and, at various points, for Switzerland. He won the Swiss nationals in 1962 and, decades later, the International Tennis Federation's world veteran tournament three times in the over-45 and over-50 categories. Tennis taught him what surfing had already suggested: that competition is a dialogue with your own limits, not a conversation with your opponent. But it also taught him something harder. He quit professional tennis when he realized he would never be a top star. The capacity to abandon a pursuit in which you are very good — not terrible, not mediocre, but genuinely accomplished — because you will not be the best at it: this is a rarer quality than most people imagine, and it runs through Lemann's career like a minor key.
Fireworks in Harvard Yard
In 1958, at seventeen, Lemann was accepted to Harvard to study economics. This was, as he later acknowledged, considerably easier for a Brazilian applicant than it would become. ("In my day it was one or two every two or three years. I can imagine that someone back then would have said: 'Wow, there are never any Brazilians here; let's be friends with this one. Who knows, he might improve our tennis team.'") His first year was, by his own account, horrible. He was freezing. He missed the beach. He was unaccustomed to studying, unaccustomed to writing in English, and his grades were poor.
On the last day of that first year, Lemann decided to celebrate by setting off cabeças de negro — Brazilian fireworks — in Harvard Yard. The students loved it. The administration did not. He was caught throwing a firework out a window, and when he returned to Brazil for the summer, a letter followed: the university recommended he take a year off "to mature a bit."
Here was a fork. Lemann was already ambivalent about college, ready to enter what he called "the real world." But the family pressure was enormous — he had to graduate. He examined the letter carefully and noticed it recommended a leave of absence but did not demand one. So he went back. And he developed a system: he interviewed students who had already taken each course, identified the easiest path to graduation, and discovered that all previous exams were archived in the library. He finished the remaining three years in two. The degree was earned in 1961.
He would later describe this as "obviously the wrong decision" — not the return to Harvard, but the rushing. "I could have learned so much more," he said in a speech years afterward. The regret is genuine but also, one suspects, slightly performative. Lemann learned exactly what he needed at Harvard: not economics, but the principle that institutions have rules and rules have seams, and a sufficiently determined person can move through the seams faster than anyone expects.
The Goldman Sachs of Brazil
What followed was a period of searching. Lemann worked briefly as a journalist for Jornal do Brasil. He trained at Credit Suisse in Geneva, where he encountered something that would shape every business he subsequently built: the percentage incentive model — a compensation structure in which earnings were tied not to seniority or salary but to the performance of the investments you managed. Rather than a fixed paycheck, you got a stake.
He returned to Brazil. He joined a small finance company. It failed. "Here I was, 26 and broke and having to start again," he told students at Yale decades later. The failure was instructive less for what it taught about finance than for what it taught about recovery: the competitive spirit that had driven him through thirty-foot waves and two-year degree programs could be redirected, again and again, toward the next thing.
In 1971, during a Brazilian stock market euphoria, Lemann placed a newspaper ad: "Brokerage wanted." He was thirty-one. He assembled a handful of partners and bought a seat on the exchange. The firm was called Garantia.
It nearly died at birth. The market crashed almost immediately after Garantia opened its doors. But Lemann had done enough — barely — to survive, and survival in a crash has a way of educating you more thoroughly than any boom. Over the next two decades, he built Garantia into what the Brazilian business press and later the international press would call "the Goldman Sachs of Brazil." The comparison was not idle. Garantia adopted Goldman's partnership model, its meritocratic culture, its willingness to reward the ambitious and discard the merely competent. Lemann studied Goldman the way a chess player studies grandmaster games — not for the specific moves but for the positional logic.
Two men emerged from the Garantia system who would become Lemann's lifelong partners. Marcel Herrmann Telles, born in 1950, a Rio native who shared Lemann's appetite for competition and cost discipline. Carlos Alberto Sicupira — known as Beto — born in 1948, an entrepreneur with a reputation for blunt operational intensity and a gift for extracting performance from people who didn't know they had it in them. Together, the three became known in Brazil as "the Three Musketeers," a nickname that suggests swashbuckling romance but understates the methodical, nearly monastic quality of their actual approach.
We are copiers, actually. Most of the stuff we've learned has been from Jack Welch, Jim Collins, from GE, from Wal-Mart. We've just copied and tried to do it better.
The Garantia model was straightforward: hire people who were, in Lemann's private taxonomy, "PSD" — poor, smart, and with a deep desire to get rich — pay them low base salaries with enormous performance-linked bonuses, evaluate ruthlessly on a 20-70-10 curve borrowed from Jack Welch's General Electric (top 20% promoted, middle 70% retained, bottom 10% fired), and make the best performers partners. The culture was intense, competitive, and deliberately uncomfortable. It attracted a type: young, hungry, male, allergic to waste, willing to work with a ferocity that their peers at Brazil's older, more genteel financial institutions found slightly alarming.
In 1998, after suffering heavy losses in the Asian financial crisis, Lemann sold Garantia to Credit Suisse First Boston for $675 million. The bank was gone. But the people it had produced — the alumni of its culture — were about to reshape the global consumer-goods industry.
From Brahma to Budweiser
The beer story begins, as many Lemann stories do, with copying someone else's idea and executing it with more discipline than the original.
In the late 1980s, while still running Garantia, Lemann and his partners acquired Cervejaria Brahma, Brazil's largest brewery. The company was bloated, inefficient, and run in a manner that offended every principle the Three Musketeers held sacred. They installed their own people. They cut costs with the kind of enthusiasm that others might reserve for religious observance. They introduced what would become the defining management technique of every 3G enterprise: zero-based budgeting.
The concept is less exotic than it sounds, and more radical than it appears. In a conventional budget, last year's spending is the baseline — you argue about increments. In zero-based budgeting, the baseline is zero. Every expense, every department, every line item must be justified from scratch, every year. Nothing is inherited. Nothing is sacred. "You want something, you need to make a case for it," as one 3G executive later explained. The effect is psychological as much as financial: it creates a permanent state of institutional anxiety in which no manager can assume the continuation of anything — not their team, not their budget, not their job.
Brahma, under 3G management, became lean and profitable. Then they acquired rival Antarctica and merged the two to form Ambev, which controlled the majority of Brazil's beer market. Then, in 2004, Ambev merged with Belgium's Interbrew to form InBev, instantly creating one of the world's largest beer companies. And then, in 2008, came the move that made Lemann a global figure: InBev's $52 billion acquisition of Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser — perhaps the most American of all American brands.
The Anheuser-Busch deal was hostile in spirit if not always in technical designation. The old Busch family had run the company for generations with the baronial confidence of midwestern royalty: corporate jets, lavish executive perks, a SeaWorld theme park, a Clydesdale stable. The 3G team, led by Carlos Brito — a Garantia alum whom Lemann had handpicked — walked into St. Louis and began cutting with the same blank-eyed efficiency they had brought to Brahma. Fourteen hundred jobs were eliminated, 75% of them in St. Louis. The corporate jets were sold. The Clydesdales survived, but not much else did.
AB InBev became, in the words of trade press, "a profit- and margin-generating machine." It was, by the standards of the private equity world, a triumph. By the standards of St. Louis, it was something closer to an occupation.
How a Brazilian brewery became the world's largest beer company
1989Lemann, Telles, and Sicupira acquire Cervejaria Brahma
1999Brahma merges with rival Antarctica to form Ambev
2004Ambev merges with Belgium's Interbrew to create InBev
2008InBev acquires Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion, forming AB InBev
2016AB InBev acquires SABMiller for ~$100 billion
The One-Page Deal
Jorge Paulo Lemann and Warren Buffett met on the Gillette board — the exact year neither has publicly specified with precision, though it was likely in the early 2000s. They liked each other but didn't talk much; board meetings were, as Buffett put it, "fairly well-scripted in terms of time." The relationship simmered. Buffett would later call this "one of the larger mistakes in my life" — not that they met, but that they didn't team up sooner.
The partnership crystallized in Colorado, around 2009. As they walked to a plane, Lemann mentioned Heinz. "Sounds good to me," Buffett replied. Sometime later, Lemann sent over two pages: one of financial terms, one of governance terms. Buffett didn't change a word. The deal was done the way Buffett liked to do deals — with people he trusted, on a handshake plus a single sheet of paper.
The Heinz acquisition was announced on Valentine's Day 2013, valued at $23 billion (or $28 billion including assumed debt). Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital co-invested, but the division of labor was clear: Buffett provided the capital and the legitimacy — the reassurance to the American public that these Brazilians were friendly — and 3G provided the operators.
The operators arrived fast. Bill Johnson, Heinz's CEO of fifteen years, was replaced by Bernardo Hees, a 3G partner. Hees gave his first speech to the top fifty executives at a leadership conference in San Francisco, then summoned most of them, one by one, into a separate room. Eleven of the top twelve learned they no longer had jobs. Within a month, 350 of the 1,200 full-time positions at Pittsburgh headquarters were eliminated, plus another 250 elsewhere in North America. The replacement hires were younger, leaner, drawn from inside the 3G system or from other 3G-managed companies.
It's our kind of company. It's got a group of fantastic brands led by ketchup. The company started in 1869 with horseradish.
The idea of waste, within the 3G cosmology, was not merely imprudent but sinful — the word James Fontanella-Khan of the Financial Times used, and it captures something about the almost religious intensity of the 3G approach to overhead. Color photocopiers were banned at Burger King under 3G management. Canteen budgets were renegotiated. Corporate travel was ruthlessly scrutinized. The philosophy was Franciscan in its austerity and Calvinist in its conviction that frugality was a sign of moral seriousness.
The Blueprint Consumes Kraft
Heinz was the proof of concept. But 3G had never intended to stop at one brand. While the ketchup company was being optimized, a team of young analysts in New York — mostly in their twenties, working with the meticulous intensity that the 3G system bred — were already scouting the next target. They studied truck counts at factory gates, analyzed packaging efficiency, modeled margin expansion scenarios. They were, in the words of one observer, "great financial engineers."
They landed on Kraft.
The merger was announced in 2015. All told, through the Heinz vehicle, Buffett and 3G picked up Kraft at a combined enterprise value of nearly $63 billion. The new entity — the Kraft Heinz Company — became the third-largest food and beverage company in North America, holding brands that constituted a kind of inventory of the American middle-class refrigerator: Maxwell House coffee, Velveeta, Philadelphia cream cheese, Oscar Mayer, Jell-O.
For a private investment firm to pull off a transaction of this scale was, as Fontanella-Khan noted, "kind of insane." Buffett was indispensable — not only for the cash but for the cachet. The distinction mattered. When American workers in Allentown, Pennsylvania, or Madison, Wisconsin, heard that their companies had been acquired, and that Warren Buffett was involved, many assumed the news was good. Rod Miller, a sixty-one-year-old worker at the Kraft Heinz plant in Allentown who had spent most of his career making Italian and Russian dressings, told the Financial Times that he and his colleagues had thought Buffett would save their jobs. "It turned out not to be like that," Fontanella-Khan reported. "It turned out that Warren Buffett is a very good capitalist."
The 3G playbook at Kraft followed the same arc: new management (Bernardo Hees installed as CEO), aggressive cost reduction, factory closures, workforce cuts. From the time 3G took over Heinz through the Kraft integration, a fifth of the combined workforce was laid off. Seven plants were shuttered. The Oscar Mayer plant in Madison, Wisconsin — once the city's largest employer, with over 4,000 workers at its peak — was scheduled for closure after ninety-eight years of continuous operation. When the last workers left in 2017, the fifty-acre site was estimated to be worth somewhere between negative $10 million and negative $20 million, factoring in the environmental remediation it would require.
But the margins. The margins were extraordinary. Kraft Heinz achieved the highest profit margins of any major consumer company — by a lot. Wall Street was enraptured. If you were invested in any other consumer company, your investors would tell you: You need to copy those guys.
The $147 Billion Embarrassment
Success creates a particular kind of blindness. When a formula has worked for three decades across beer, burgers, and ketchup, the temptation to believe it will work everywhere becomes almost irresistible. In early 2017, Kraft Heinz — acting on 3G's ambitions — made an approach to Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods colossus whose portfolio spanned everything from Dove soap to Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
The bid was staggering: $147 billion. It would have been one of the largest corporate acquisitions in history.
Unilever, under CEO Paul Polman, embodied a very different philosophy — what Fontanella-Khan called "a more gentle form of capitalism," focused on sustainability, stakeholder value, and the kind of brand investment that 3G's zero-based budgeting tended to view as fat. From 3G's perspective, this made Unilever an ideal target: there was, in their estimation, a great deal of inefficiency to extract. From Unilever's perspective, 3G's approach represented an existential threat to everything the company stood for.
The Financial Times broke the story. The reaction was swift and hostile. "We kind of probably killed the deal," Fontanella-Khan later reflected. Unilever's board, its employees, its European political allies, and a large portion of public opinion mobilized against what was rapidly framed as a hostile bid — barbarians not at the gate but already inside the garden.
What made it worse was Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha, who had built his public persona on the principle of friendly dealmaking — folksy, patient, avuncular — publicly distanced himself. "I don't think it's evil or anything to conduct a hostile offer for a company," he said in a carefully worded statement. "It's just we won't do it." The implicit rebuke was devastating. One wonders, as Fontanella-Khan did, whether the distancing was entirely sincere: Buffett sat on the Kraft Heinz board at the time, and the question of how much he knew in advance remains, at minimum, an interesting one. "Buffett cares a lot about his image," the FT reporter observed. "He's a shrewd investor."
Kraft Heinz withdrew its bid. Lemann, according to people close to him, was not happy. It was, as Fontanella-Khan put it, "incredibly embarrassing. They're not used to failing."
The Terrified Dinosaur
The cracks, once they appeared, multiplied with the speed that cracks in load-bearing structures tend to exhibit.
In the same quarter the Unilever bid collapsed, Kraft Heinz earnings missed expectations. The share price fell. In 2018, Buffett announced he was stepping down from the Kraft Heinz board — a move that, despite public denials of tension between the partners, was widely read as a vote of diminished confidence. Then, in April 2018, at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles — the annual convocation of mainly male, mainly white financiers that functions as a kind of Davos for the American capital class — Lemann made a rare public appearance and said something that nobody in the audience expected to hear from the most feared corporate operator on the planet.
"I'm a terrified dinosaur."
He elaborated. He had attended a food industry session where all anyone could talk about was new products, new production methods, new consumer preferences. He had been disrupted. The cost-cutting playbook that had generated industry-best margins for three decades had, it turned out, extracted value not only from overhead but from the brands themselves — from marketing, from innovation, from the capacity to evolve alongside consumers who were increasingly demanding organic options, craft alternatives, sustainability commitments, and a relationship with the companies that fed them that went beyond "the cheapest possible product at the widest possible margin."
The confession was startling precisely because Lemann spoke publicly so rarely. "When you don't speak that often," Fontanella-Khan noted, "every word that you then say publicly counts."
What followed was the trifecta. In February 2019, Kraft Heinz reported fourth-quarter 2018 results that included a $15 billion goodwill write-down on the Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands, an SEC investigation into procurement accounting practices, and a dividend cut. The JP Morgan analyst on the earnings call said the quiet part out loud: Is it at least some evidence starting to point to the idea that the 3G belt-tightening strategy went too far and damaged brands?
A few days after the earnings call, Buffett appeared on CNBC and delivered the epitaph: "We overpaid for Kraft."
The Apology at Harvard
In May 2020, speaking at the annual Brazil Conference at Harvard-MIT, Lemann gave what amounted to a public reckoning. The setting was fitting — the university that had nearly expelled him six decades earlier for the fireworks incident, where he had learned to find the seams in institutional rules, was now the stage for an admission that some rules could not be circumvented.
His words, as reported by multiple attendees, were unusually direct for a man who had spent a lifetime cultivating discretion:
"About 30 years ago, more or less, we bought Brahma, and the first 25 years were very, very successful; return on equity and everything was exceptional. Then, these last five or six years, we haven't done as well, and I think a lot about why we haven't done as well. We had a formula which was to attract very good people, pay them very well, manage things very efficiently, keep expenses down, have a big dream and everybody driven in that direction. And we sort of missed out a little bit on two things. We missed out on being more consumer centric — the whole world has become consumer centric, the consumer has many more options — and we remained with our focus on producing things efficiently."
The second omission was talent. 3G had relied for years on a brotherhood of Brazilian managers — the Garantia alumni and their intellectual descendants — dispatched around the world to run businesses in countries they didn't know, in industries they hadn't studied. (One Brazilian executive was reportedly relocated from managing a struggling railroad in southern Brazil to become CEO of Burger King.) For years, this had been a feature, not a bug: 3G's people were interchangeable because the system was the product, not the individual. But as the consumer landscape shifted, the system needed people who understood digital distribution, social media marketing, data analytics — skills that the old PSD recruits, however driven, often did not possess. And increasingly, Brazil's best graduates were turning their backs on 3G altogether, preferring entrepreneurial tech startups to the bruising, "macho" culture that had once been the country's most prestigious employer.
The AB InBev acquisition of SABMiller in 2016 for roughly $100 billion compounded the problem. It was so large that it taxed the management capacity of the entire system. AB InBev's stock underperformed rival Heineken for years afterward.
The Americanas Reckoning
If the Kraft Heinz humiliation was a stumble, the Americanas scandal was a blow to the foundation.
Americanas is a Brazilian retail chain — 1,700 stores selling everything from electronics to snacks — in which Lemann, Telles, and Sicupira had held stakes since 1982. It was, in a sense, one of their first investments, predating the beer empire, predating 3G Capital, predating everything. In January 2023, a new CEO named Sergio Rial — formerly the head of Santander in Brazil, a figure of impeccable financial establishment credentials — resigned after only nine days on the job. The reason: he had discovered a $4 billion accounting hole.
The fraud, as the Financial Times subsequently detailed, involved a common but opaque Brazilian retail practice: banks would pay Americanas' suppliers in advance, with the company responsible for repaying the loans plus interest. These interest payments, however, had been effectively camouflaged, not classified as financial debts. The result was years of overstated profits and a flattering balance sheet that bore diminishing resemblance to reality.
Americanas filed for bankruptcy protection. Its stock plunged more than 85%. BTG Pactual, the Brazilian investment bank, took the unusual step of launching a personal attack on the billionaire backers in a court filing: "The three richest men in Brazil, with assets valued at R$180 billion, anointed as kind of demigods of 'good' world capitalism, are caught with their hands in the cash register."
Lemann, Telles, and Sicupira issued a statement denying any knowledge of accounting manipulation. "Over the decades, our actions have always been guided by ethical and legal principles," they wrote. They said they were "sorry for investor and creditor losses." The apology was genuine or it was not. What is certain is that the scandal raised a question that had been accumulating force for years: Was the 3G model — obsessive cost discipline, relentless meritocracy, a culture that prioritized results over everything — capable of producing the kind of oversight that catches a $4 billion fraud before it metastasizes? Or was the very intensity of the system, its worship of efficiency and speed, a reason that inconvenient truths could go unexamined?
The Drop in the Ocean
There is another Lemann, less discussed in the financial press, who deserves attention — if only because the philanthropist complicates the portrait of the cost-cutter in ways that resist easy resolution.
In 2002, Lemann established the Lemann Foundation, a family-based philanthropic organization registered in Switzerland and based in São Paulo, dedicated to improving public education in Brazil and developing leaders committed to social transformation. The foundation's mission sits at the intersection of Lemann's deepest convictions — that people are the most important asset of any enterprise, and that Brazil, despite being one of the world's wealthiest nations by
GDP, ranks among the most unequal. Forty-eight percent of Brazilian children cannot read at the age of ten. At the country's current rate of improvement, it will take 260 years to reach rich-country reading scores. Afro-Brazilian students are 2.5 times more likely to be illiterate than their white peers.
The foundation has funded more than 3,000 scholarships and fellowships for Brazilian students at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Illinois, MIT, Oxford. It endowed chairs and centers for Brazilian studies at four universities. It facilitated the trials of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in Brazil, funding the clinical research that proved the vaccine's efficacy and then helping to build domestic production capability through a partnership with Fiocruz, Brazil's largest vaccine manufacturer.
"Before founding the Lemann Foundation, I believed that fulfilling my entrepreneurial calling was enough to repay Brazil for the opportunities it had afforded me," Lemann has written. "However, I came to the conclusion that I could go further, taking my big dreams beyond the corporate world. Even though its efforts are only a drop in the ocean of all that must be done to address Brazil's current needs and challenges, I believe it will be a meaningful drop."
A drop in the ocean. It is the kind of phrase that in most mouths would sound like false modesty. In Lemann's — a man who had never been satisfied with small dreams, who had built the world's largest beer company because he could not tolerate being merely the largest in Brazil — it sounds like something closer to genuine bewilderment at the scale of the problem. The man who could squeeze a margin out of ketchup production cannot squeeze illiteracy out of a nation of 207 million people. The tools are different. The timeline is longer. And the results cannot be measured in quarterly earnings.
We support a Brazil that believes in its people so people can believe in Brazil.
A Monastery on Copacabana
Here is the paradox at the center of Jorge Paulo Lemann's story, the thing that does not resolve.
He is, by every account, personally austere — not flashy, not ostentatious, an "old-world financier" who dresses simply, drives (or once drove) cheap cars in Brazil to avoid kidnapping attempts, and maintains a level of privacy that borders on the pathological. He has lived in Switzerland since 1999, reportedly after a threatened kidnapping of his children. He rarely gives interviews. He does not cultivate a public persona. The 3G culture he built — open offices, no perks, relentless measurement — is, as one observer put it, "much more Swiss than Brazilian." In a country famous for color, for joy, for carnival, Lemann transmits what Fontanella-Khan called "a sense of nearly monastic austerity."
And yet the empire he built was fundamentally about consumption — beer, burgers, ketchup, mac and cheese. The most exuberant, least monastic products imaginable. He made his fortune selling the ingredients of weekend barbecues and Super Bowl parties to people who would never, in a thousand years, confuse frugality with virtue. The ascetic was a merchant of pleasure.
The tension goes deeper. Lemann's management philosophy rests on the belief that people are the most important asset — that finding, training, and keeping good people is "a constant and permanent struggle." He has spent decades building systems designed to identify exceptional talent and reward it with partnership. But the same systems, applied to companies like Kraft Heinz, resulted in the elimination of thousands of jobs held by people like Rod Miller — the sixty-one-year-old dressing maker in Allentown who, standing in the snow outside a job center, told the Financial Times he didn't believe in the system anymore.
Jim Collins, the
Good to Great author who has been friends with the Three Musketeers since meeting Lemann at a Stanford executive program in the early 1990s, wrote in his foreword to Cristiane Correa's
Dream Big: "If anyone would have told me then that these bankers had the dream to build the biggest beer company in the world, and to buy Anheuser-Busch along the way, I would have said, 'That's not a vision, that's delusion.' Yet, of course, that's exactly what they did."
Delusion and vision are, perhaps, the same thing viewed from different moments in time.
At Yale in 2021, Lemann told students that Kraft Heinz had become "a much better company" since hiring 25 of its top managers from outside the 3G pipeline. He now believed that 20% of any company's workforce should come from outside the organizational culture. It was a quiet repudiation of one of the central tenets of his career — the idea that the system could produce all the talent it needed. The system, it turned out, had limits. Like every system. Like every person.
His wife still asks him why he doesn't have as much time as Warren Buffett. The datebook, one imagines, remains full.
