Eike Batista Quotes
100 Eike Batista Quotes
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Failures only make you grow.
Eike Batista
In mining you go to some crazy place, you set up a camp. You start looking for water and energy and this way you can build anything. That’s the mind-set. That’s my life. That’s how I started from zero.
Eike Batista
I simply didn’t want to get money from my parents anymore. This was very powerful.
Eike Batista
I made $6 million when I was twenty-two years of age.
Eike Batista
The mine was so rich it was totally idiot-proof.
Eike Batista
I always had a great interest in engineering for the sake of making things better.
Eike Batista
I learned to think.
Eike Batista
My mother taught me discipline – she was German, from Hamburg – and so she taught me discipline and care, caring for others, which is very much what I got from her, which forged me in many ways.
Eike Batista
When I was eleven or twelve I had asthma. My mother said I think you could cure this through swimming. And she kept throwing me into a swimming pool to the point that I solved my asthma problem. That was added stress in my life, and it makes you tougher.
Eike Batista
[On borrowing money from two jewelers to buy gold] I don’t think they would have given me any money if I asked them to buy chocolate.
Eike Batista
Somehow I have a pact with nature. Everywhere I drill I find oil, coal or gold.
Eike Batista
[On closing down his jeep factory] I lost more than $100 million…
Eike Batista
I want to be the world’s biggest philanthropist.
Eike Batista
If you look at the world through the eyes of an engineer, there are a lot of opportunities.
Eike Batista
America and Brazil have allowed the financial people to make money through money. We have forgotten to make things more efficient.
Eike Batista
Entrepreneurs… need to take a long-term view. Projects that have quality take three to five years to be built.
Eike Batista
My advice to young people is start small and think long term.
Eike Batista
What I have learned in the 30 years is to - I read people better than I read books.
Eike Batista
I’m very competitive.
Eike Batista
I like a challenge.
Eike Batista
Wealth creation is all about in natural resources, is identifying seeing these things and putting the right people together to make it happen, produce it.
Eike Batista
I’ve made it a mission to help a new generation of Brazilian entrepreneurs be successful in a more transparent way. They should be proud of what they are creating.
Eike Batista
I see myself as an entrepreneur. Somehow I have a pact with Mother Nature. I drill and I find things. Somehow you have to have luck.
Eike Batista
After two and a half years at Aachen University in Germany I realized that I already had a grasp on the engineering part of the world, so I wanted to make money.
Eike Batista
I owned a motorbike that went 90 to 100 kilometers an hour. I spent hours trying to make it faster.
Eike Batista
In 1989, when I decided to race powerboats in Brazil, I became the Brazilian, the American and the world champion because of two things: understanding how to build a team and smart engineering. It’s a very dangerous sport and a five-cent piece could make you lose the race or even die.
Eike Batista
From the 1960s to the 1980s, my father was very busy building the international offices of Vale, the Brazilian steel giant.
Eike Batista
What my father taught me, what I learned from him, is to think big, because he built – there’s a movie in Brazil called Brazil’s Engineer, and it’s about him, because he built part of Brazil’s macro-infrastructure – railways, super ports for shipment of iron ore to Asia, back then to Japan. And so I learned to think.
Eike Batista
I’m one of seven children, the second.
Eike Batista
I began selling insurance…This taught me how to talk to people. Some doors open and some do not.
Eike Batista
A brutal desire to be financially independent.
Eike Batista
I tell young people, especially middle and upper-class youngsters, that parents should not make it too easy for them. We pamper them too much.
Eike Batista
[On him selling insurance] Within a month, I made more than double what I needed by selling insurance. I bought an old Mercedes, so when I drove up to the doors I could show off.
Eike Batista
I went to visit the Amazon in the northern part of Brazil, where lots of pick-and-shovel miners were producing lots of gold. It was like the old Wild West.
Eike Batista
What I realized was that a lot of gold was being produced and so my idea was to become a trader, to buy and sell the gold. I didn’t want to initially participate in the gold production because local owners who had the planes and controlled the landing strips to move the gold out controlled it. The mules of the jungle were Cessna 186 planes.
Eike Batista
I went to two jewelers in Rio and asked them to lend me some money. I said I would bring the gold to Rio and Sao Paulo from the Amazon. Somehow, they liked what I said and obviously it was gold, you know. I don’t think they would have given me any money if I asked them to buy chocolate.
Eike Batista
[On borrowing money from two jewelers to buy gold] They charged me 20 percent interest rate on the money and also wanted some of the product. So they wanted a double-interest. But in eighteen months, I managed to buy $60 million in gold and, after discounting everything, I was left with a net of 10 percent. So I made $6 million when I was twenty-two years of age.
Eike Batista
[After he had made $6 million] What happened was that during that time other traders started to come into the area and I saw very clearly that my 10 percent margin was going to go sharply down to perhaps 2 percent or 3 percent. I said, ‘Well, it’s time to think about something else.’ So looking at these pick-and-shovel miners producing gold very inefficiently, I decided I am going to buy one of these sites from an owner and mechanize the production of gold. So I bought a mine for $2 million and the first thing I did was I hired a Canadian drilling company that specialized in drilling alluvial deposits.
Eike Batista
I was down to my last $300,000 because I had obviously under-estimated logistics, diseases, and mechanical problems… It was very stressful, I must tell you.
Eike Batista
I had to airlift the gold out. The closest road was 100 kilometers from the mine…
Eike Batista
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