Meet Argentina's Richest Man

Meet Argentina’s richest man The boss of Mercado Libre ponders Javier Milei, self-doubt and the dangers of wokery Portrait of Marcos Galperin. photograph: getty images Apr 25th 2024|montevideo Save Share Give Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Even billionaires ponder the path not taken. At 17, Marcos Galperin had returned from a tour playing competitive rugby in Australia and New Zealand, two egg-chasing powerhouses, when he was offered a place at the University of Pennsylvania to study business. “I had to make a choice,” recalls the 52-year-old founder of Mercado Libre, Latin America’s dominant e-commerce and payments firm, from his office in Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital. But old dreams die hard. “If I were to be born again I would definitely go for a sports career,” says Mr Galperin. Still, being a billionaire has its compensations. Last year he bought the Miami Sharks, a rugby team in the United States. Argentina’s rugby team could have used a handy fly-half in the 1990s, but both Mr Galperin’s home country and Latin America are much better off for his choice of business. It is hard to overstate Mercado Libre’s impact. In a region of 670m people, the firm counted 218m active users last year. They buy and sell goods online, and use Mercado Pago, the firm’s payments arm, to pay for everything from roadside snacks to football tickets. Mr Galperin is the mega-star of Latin America’s technology scene. With a net worth of over $6bn he is one of the region’s wealthiest men. Already powerful in business, he is increasingly outspoken on social media. Mr Galperin was born into traditional Argentine wealth: a family-owned leather empire. Excited by the internet, he made the classic moves of an aspiring tech mogul, attending Stanford Business School and starting a business in a garage. That was in 1999. Today Mercado Libre has a market capitalisation of some $70bn, making it the second-most valuable publicly traded company in the region after Petrobras, a Brazilian oil giant. After battling sluggish service and frequent price rises from postal companies, Mercado Libre built its own vast delivery network, boasting planes and the continent’s biggest fleet of electric vehicles. Mercado Pago processed payments worth $183bn last year and provides credit cards and loans to some 15m people, 60% of whom had never had a loan before, says Mr Galperin. As a young man he had lashings of self-confidence. “To be honest, we thought we were going to get here much faster,” he quips. Yet he also admits to having doubts about whether Mercado Libre would make it, and underlines luck as an element of his success. “All these years I had all this anxiety…You have your balance in the bank coming down every month. It’s a horrible feeling.” Breaking even in 2005 was not a moment of celebration, but of relief. In keeping with this, in 2014 he complained about bosses using their firms as a route to fame. Mercado Libre was different, he said. “We want the company to be famous. The lower our personal profile, the better.” This, however, has changed. Today he is outspoken, particularly about Argentina, where his social-media posts regularly make waves. The Argentine economy is like a sports player who was once the best in the world, he says. “Now he’s obese, a drug addict, has cancer, aids and is an alcoholic.” Like many Argentines, Mr Galperin has been radicalised by years of economic chaos. In 2019 he called himself a Bill Clinton Democrat. Today he backs Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist”. When Mr Milei was elected in November, Mr Galperin posted a photo of doves breaking out of chains with one word: “Free.” Mr Milei has had an impressive start, he says, pointing to monthly budget surpluses, falling inflation and growing market confidence. “They took away the alcohol and drugs, but that’s also very painful,” he says, referring to the recession prompted by deep spending cuts. There is a long way to go: “The patient still has cancer and aids and is obese because for that to change you need to reform a lot of things.” Despite this bleak analysis, Mr Galperin reckons the odds of Mr Milei succeeding at reforming the economy are improving. Argentina’s story shapes his other views, too. He is bullish about bitcoin, which can be bought and sold on Mercado Pago, because he claims it is a better store of value than dollars, euros or yen. “Coming from Argentina, I know what happens when you have permanent deficits: your currencies devalue,” he says, skating over bitcoin’s own gyrations. His scepticism of government runs wider. “There is no innovation in Europe,” he claims, blaming excessive regulation. He loves Israel, by contrast, because it shows “the triumph of capitalism”. In Argentina too many people argue about capitalism rather than doing it, he suggests. And he frets about the influence of woke thinking, a prominent feature of Argentina’s last Peronist government; he draws a straight line from wokery to socialism and dictatorship. “It all starts with a really nice speech about equality and it ends up in authoritarianism and poverty,” he says. Success is the best revenge Mr Galperin is at his most strident on X, a social-media platform, where he tangles with public figures and random accounts, mocking critics with memes, kiss emojis and questions about whether they own shares in Mercado Libre. A secular Jew, he is vociferous in his support of Israel in its war in Gaza. He waves away the possibility that his outspokenness might pose a risk to Mercado Libre. Few outside Argentina care what he says, he argues, before insisting that he is in fact not that outspoken. Mercado Libre is certainly booming. On April 17th it said it would hire another 18,000 people, taking its total workforce to 76,000. That is perhaps the most telling riposte to his leftist online critics. ■ Sign up to El Boletín, our subscriber-only newsletter on Latin America, to understand the forces shaping a fascinating and complex region. Explore more Argentina