If Eike Batista was a superstitious man, he would probably track the start of his spectacular fall from grace to one night in March last year, when his eldest son appeared on the news in a blood-spattered white T-shirt. Twenty-year-old Thor had been driving his father’s Mercedes – the one the Brazilian oil and mining baron normally displayed in the living room of his Rio de Janeiro mansion – when he ran over and killed Wanderson Pereira dos Santos, a 30-year-old labourer, on the city’s impoverished fringe.
Though it had nothing to do with business, the horrific accident was a bad omen. Mr Batista, then Brazil’s richest man, was at the peak of his fortune, estimated by Bloomberg at $34.5bn. Within months, scepticism was mounting over whether the recent offshore oil discoveries of OGX, his flagship oil company, would be as productive as it claimed. They were not. On October 1, it missed a payment on its $3.6bn in bonds. Mr Batista has until next Thursday to secure a restructuring. The company is already preparing a bankruptcy filing in case talks are unsuccessful. This would trigger Latin America’s biggest corporate debt default.
For Mr Batista, the qualities that helped him soar to the heights of the global rich list – hubris, ambition, some would argue megalomania – also contributed to his fall. It seems the self-appointed chief salesman of the Brazil story, who marketed the image of a more dynamic, entrepreneurial, capitalist nation, began to believe his own pitch. Mistakes followed. Instead of symbolising Brazil’s rise, he has ended up an emblem of the country’s current falling out with investors.