Marcos Galperin, founder of Mercado Libre, the Amazon of Latin America, is Argentina’s richest man, but his country’s economic woes have led him to embrace radical change. Jane Lewis reports
Argentina’s richest man, Marcos Galperin, makes no bones about the country’s financial woes. The economy, says the rugby-loving billionaire, is like a sports player who was once the best in the world. “Now he’s obese, a drug addict, has cancer, Aids and is an alcoholic.” Like many Argentines, Galperin has been “radicalised” by years of chaos, says The Economist. In 2019, he called himself “a Bill Clinton Democrat”. But when the “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei appeared on the scene, he was a ready convert – marking the latter’s election as president last November by posting a photo of doves breaking out of chains, captioned: “Free”.
A unique kind of beast
Milei has vowed to impose “a bruising austerity campaign”. That doesn’t worry “the mega-star” of Latin America’s technology scene, who has thrived on regional economic turmoil to build Mercado Libre – the e-commerce site he founded in 1999 – into the region’s second-largest company after the Brazilian oil giant Petrobas, with a market capitalisation of some $70bn. These days the firm, and its 52-year-old boss, are based in neighbouring Uruguay, whose comparatively stable economy and lower tax burden have made it a haven for many wealthy Argentinians, says the Financial Times. Yet Argentina, as Fortune notes, remains Galperin’s “spiritual” home. “I worry more about the country than I worry about the company,” he says. “What we do, at the end of the day, helps the weakest people in Latin America.”
Mercado Libre is often called “the Amazon” of the region – selling goods, from electronics to supermarket basics, with the promise of 24-hour delivery. “But it would be a disservice to paint Galperin as a Jeff Bezos imitator,” says Fortune. In the process of constantly adapting Mercado Libre to the complex challenges of Latin America, he has invented a unique kind of beast: part ecommerce giant, part fintech, “whose regional dominance has little parallel in the rest of the world”.
In 2003, Mercado Libre launched Mercado Pago: a payments system that appealed to the region’s many “unbanked” cus
