The combination of greed, ego and charisma has been a common characteristic of many that have lost fortunes for their investors’ and Eike Batista is one of the largest examples. He built an empire of businesses, capitalizing on the excitement surrounding the emergence of the Brazilian economy utilizing other people’s money primarily. The most poignant part of the article below to me was how his oil company OGX, which had no real experience in drilling and exploration, decided to try and perform the tasks on its own without partnering with a more sophisticated participant. The company amassed huge amounts of debt and raised substantial equity but quickly burned through the capital because no oil was found. Many of the investors’ that got burned such as Pimco, Blackrock and GE were extremely sophisticated so this wasn’t a case of individual investors simply getting scammed. It is unclear if there was any fraud or inside trading, but there is certainly a lot of smoke surrounding the fire of Mr. Batista’s empire.