As a 20-year-old who sold scarves on the street of Buenos Aires for extra cash in the 1970s, Eduardo Costantini never thought he'd be a billionaire. He'd grown up with parents who struggled to make ends meet. Costantini got married young, so he had to come up with a way to support his own family. There was another factor hampering his chances: his country's economic situation.
Between 1975 and 1990, real income per capita in Argentina fell by more than 20%. The country's manufacturing industry faltered and in 1989 inflation reached a whopping 3,000%. Argentina has since suffered many other economic crises, the most recent a government debt default in 2014.
Mauricio Macri, who became Argentina's president in December 2015, vowed to turn around his country's economy. He's so far managed a few feats, including an elimination of some tariffs and the resolution of an international credit dispute.
More than a year after his election, Argentina still faces challenges. The country's GDP growth was negative in 2016 and the Argentine peso has fallen in value against the dollar. But the economic reforms have spurred enthusiasm among some investors, who pushed up Argentina's key stock market index by 50% between December 2015 and mid-February 2017. Here are three Argentinians who rode that wave to the billionaire ranks:
Eduardo Costantini
Born in 1946, Eduardo Costantini grew up alongside 12 siblings and a cousin. His father worked as a lawyer and an accountant, but he barely had money to pay for schools or put food on the table, Costantini says. The family's fifth child, Costantini earned his first pesos managing the books at his brother's company and peddling scarves on the streets of Buenos Aires, all while attending college.
He saved $25,000 to pay for a master's degree in economics at the University of East Anglia in England and returned to Argentina in the mid 1970s. A friend loaned him about $200,000, which Costantini says he turned into about $400,000 in about 5 months by investing in the stock market. He repaid his friend and used his take to buy a piece of land that, within a year, he sold for about $1 million.
Constantini later bought 20% of an Argentine bank, netting about $200 million when he sold the stake in the mid 1990s. In 1991, he founded Consultatio S.A., a real-estate firm with developments in Argentina and Uruguay whose shares trade in Buenos Aires. Shares are up about 50% for the year. Costantini founded in 2009 a real estate company in the U.S. that built two towers near Miami that cost $700 million. He also owns Consultatio Asset Management, a firm that administers $700 million in assets. In 2001 he donated more than 200 pieces of art to start the MALBA, the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art.
Marcos Galperin
While pursuing an MBA at Stanford University in the late 1990s, Marcos Galperin noticed that Latin American entrepreneurs weren't yet harnessing the internet to make shopping easier. So he wrote a business plan for MercadoLibre, an e-commerce platform that, among other things, would help people living in remote areas buy and sell goods -- an eBay for rural Latin America. "I saw [that e-commerce] was even more useful in Latin America than it was in the United States," Galperin said at a MercadoLibre Q&A last year. "Any small town in the U.S., there are supermarkets and important chains taking care of all those towns. Latin America is harder."
In 1998, Galperin shared his idea with a group of Stanford classmates from Latin America. They said that such an e-commerce marketplace would never work because Latin Americans don't trust each other and would never buy objects they haven't seen or touched, Galperin wrote in blog post. Ignoring the naysayers, Galperin launched MercadoLibre in 1999 out of a garage in Buenos Aires. The company expanded to seven other countries within a year, and Galperin listed it on the NASDAQ in August 2007. Today, MercadoLibre operates in 18 Latin American countries and Portugal, processing 4.5 purchases per second. Until 2016, eBay was MercadoLibre's largest shareholder with 18% ownership. MercadoLibre shares rose 116% in the past year, putting Galperin on the Forbes Billionaires List for the first time.
Jorge Horacio Brito
Buenos-Aires native Jorge Horacio Brito got a $5,000 loan from his mother in the 1970s to create a financial firm. In 1985, Brito and brother-in-law Delfin Carballo bought Macro Financiera, the predecessor of today's Banco Macro, a bank in which Brito is the largest individual shareholder. The partners acquired three banks when Argentina privatized some financial firms in the 1990s, and the pair has since acquired about a dozen more. Banco Macro's more than 400 branches make it the private bank with the most coverage in Argentina. The firm trades in the NYSE and in the Buenos Aires stock exchange.
Brito is also the principal shareholder of publicly-traded livestock and farming firm Inversora Juramento, which owns almost 215,000 acres in northwest Argentina and boasts 54,000 head of cattle. He served for 13 years as the president of Argentina's private banking association. In addition, one of his companies, Genneia, owns a wind farm in Argentina that has broken several records for clean energy production in the country. On the key to his success, he says: "I tell all my friends the same thing and they don't believe me. It's work, work and work," he said at an awards ceremony last year. Shares of Banco Macro are up 42% for the year, and Inversora Juramento's stock is up 72%.
