ONE
THE BANK
EXT. COPACABANA BEACH — RIO DE JANEIRO — 1968 — DAY
A young JORGE PAULO LEMANN, 29, lean, tanned, competitive in every fiber, plays beach tennis with ferocious intensity. He is the Brazilian national tennis champion. He plays to win. Always.
OPPONENT
(panting) Jorge Paulo, it is a friendly match. Relax.
YOUNG LEMANN
There is no such thing as a friendly match.
He smashes a winner. Game over.
CUT TO:
INT. GARANTIA OFFICE — RIO DE JANEIRO — 1971 — DAY
1971 — BANCO GARANTIA
A modest office. LEMANN, now 32, sits with MARCEL TELLES, late 20s, and BETO SICUPIRA, mid-20s. They are creating an investment bank modeled on Goldman Sachs — meritocratic, aggressive, partnership-driven.
LEMANN
The Brazilian financial system runs on connections. Family names. Old money. We will run on performance. The best people get the best pay. Period.
TELLES
No one in Brazil does this. The banks promote by seniority, by family.
LEMANN
Then we will be the first. Goldman Sachs promotes its best people. We will do the same. Meritocracy. That is our edge.
BETO
And if the old families do not like it?
LEMANN
Then they can keep their old banks. We will take their market share.
Marcel, Beto, and I — we came from different backgrounds but shared one obsession. We believed that great people, given the right incentives, could transform any business. This was not a theory. It was a religion.
CUT TO:
INT. BRAHMA BREWERY — RIO DE JANEIRO — 1989 — DAY
1989 — ACQUISITION OF BRAHMA
A cavernous brewery. LEMANN, TELLES, and BETO walk the production floor of Companhia Cervejaria Brahma — one of Brazil's largest beer companies. They have just acquired it. The factory is bloated, inefficient, and hemorrhaging money.
TELLES
(inspecting a line) This is incredible. There are more managers than production workers. The executive dining room has its own chef. Every executive has a company car.
BETO
(picking up a memo) This memo — it went through seven approval layers before reaching the factory floor. Seven. To change a cleaning schedule.
LEMANN
This is what we do. We strip out every unnecessary cost. Every executive perk. Every redundant layer. We call it zero-based budgeting. Every year, every department starts from zero and must justify every dollar.
TELLES
They will hate us.
LEMANN
The underperformers will hate us. The best people will thrive. Give them ownership stakes. Make them partners. The rest — (he gestures to the bloated org chart) — goes.
INT. BRAHMA HEADQUARTERS — ONE YEAR LATER — DAY
The executive dining room is gone. The company cars are gone. The seven approval layers are two. Profits have doubled. TELLES runs the operation with military precision.
TELLES
(to a junior manager) Your budget was twelve million last year. This year, you start at zero. Justify every real. If you cannot explain why you need it, you do not get it.
TWO
THE KING OF BEERS
INT. 3G CAPITAL OFFICES — NEW YORK — 2008 — DAY
NEW YORK — 2008
LEMANN, now 69, sits in a spartan office. No art on the walls. No private bathroom. The world is in financial crisis. On his desk: a file labeled ANHEUSER-BUSCH.
LEMANN
(on the phone) Warren, it is Jorge Paulo. I want to buy Anheuser-Busch. The King of Beers. I need a partner.
WARREN BUFFETT (PHONE)
(chuckling) Jorge Paulo, you have done extraordinary things with beer in Brazil. But Anheuser-Busch is an American institution. The Busch family has controlled it for five generations.
LEMANN
Institutions can be improved. Five generations of family control means five generations of accumulated inefficiency. We know how to fix that.
BUFFETT (PHONE)
What do you need from me?
LEMANN
Your capital. Your credibility. And your patience.
BUFFETT (PHONE)
(long pause) I am in.
CUT TO:
INT. ANHEUSER-BUSCH BOARDROOM — ST. LOUIS — 2008 — DAY
AUGUST BUSCH IV, 44, the great-great-grandson of the founder, sits at the head of a mahogany table. His world is about to end. An ADVISOR enters.
ADVISOR
August, InBev has made a formal offer. Forty-six billion dollars. It is hostile.
AUGUST BUSCH IV
(slams table) This is Anheuser-Busch. This is America's beer company. We are not for sale. Not to some Brazilian outfit no one has heard of.
ADVISOR
The shareholders might disagree. The premium is significant.
AUGUST BUSCH IV
Then we fight. We will lobby Congress. We will rally the workers. This is not about money. This is about heritage.
INT. 3G CAPITAL — NEW YORK — WEEKS LATER — DAY
LEMANN reviews coverage of the political backlash. Missouri politicians are calling the deal un-American. Workers are protesting.
BETO
They are calling us corporate raiders. Foreign predators.
LEMANN
Let them. The shareholders will decide. And the shareholders care about returns, not about sentiment. Raise the offer to fifty-two billion.
INT. ANHEUSER-BUSCH — ST. LOUIS — NOVEMBER 2008 — DAY
NOVEMBER 18, 2008 — DEAL CLOSES AT $52 BILLION
The deal is done. The largest cash acquisition in history. AUGUST BUSCH IV walks out of the building his family built. He does not look back. 3G's team walks in.
TELLES
(surveying the executive floor) Private jets. Company hunting lodges. An executive entertainment budget larger than the GDP of some countries. (beat) This ends today.
THREE
ZERO-BASED
INT. AB INBEV HEADQUARTERS — 2009 — DAY
The transformation is swift and brutal. Executives arrive to find their offices reassigned. The private dining room is now a conference room. First-class travel is eliminated.
FORMER AB EXECUTIVE
(to colleague, packing a box) I had a corner office for fifteen years. They gave me a cubicle and a budget spreadsheet. My budget starts at zero. Zero.
COLLEAGUE
Half the executive team was fired last week. The private jet fleet — gone. The country club memberships — gone.
In a conference room, BETO presents to the remaining managers.
BETO
Every dollar you spend must generate more than a dollar in return. If it does not, you do not spend it. This is not cruelty. This is clarity. We are here to make the best beer in the world, not to fund executive lifestyles.
People call us ruthless. But what is more ruthless — cutting unnecessary costs, or letting a great company slowly die under the weight of its own indulgence? We gave the best people ownership. Real stakes. Real wealth. And we removed everything that stood between them and performance.
CUT TO:
INT. BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY OFFICE — OMAHA — 2013 — DAY
2013 — THE HEINZ ACQUISITION
LEMANN and BUFFETT sit across from each other. Two of the richest men in the world in a room that looks like an accounting office from 1975.
BUFFETT
Heinz. Twenty-three billion. You run it, I fund it. Same as before.
LEMANN
Same as before. We install our people. Zero-based budgeting. Meritocracy. Performance culture.
BUFFETT
I will be honest, Jorge Paulo. I am not entirely comfortable with how aggressively you cut. But your results speak for themselves.
LEMANN
Warren, you buy great companies and let them run. We buy good companies and make them great. Different methods. Same goal — value.
INT. KRAFT HEINZ HEADQUARTERS — CHICAGO — 2015 — DAY
2015 — KRAFT HEINZ MERGER
Kraft and Heinz merge. The 3G machine goes to work. Thousands of jobs cut. Plants closed. The zero-based approach applied to every product line.
NEWS ANCHOR (V.O.)
The newly formed Kraft Heinz Company has announced the elimination of 2,500 jobs and the closure of seven plants across North America. The company says it is “streamlining operations.”
FOUR
THE RECKONING
INT. 3G CAPITAL — NEW YORK — 2019 — DAY
FEBRUARY 2019
LEMANN, now 80, reads the headlines. Kraft Heinz has written down $15 billion in value. The stock has collapsed. The SEC is investigating. The zero-based budgeting model — cutting costs to the bone — may have gone too far. You cannot cut your way to growth.
TELLES
The brands are weakening. Consumers are moving to organic, to local. We cut the marketing budgets too deep. We cut the innovation budgets.
LEMANN
(long silence) We were right about costs. But we were wrong about one thing. You cannot only cut. At some point, you must build.
BETO
Are we admitting we made a mistake?
LEMANN
We are admitting that our model has limits. Every model has limits. The question is whether we are smart enough to evolve.
CUT TO:
INT. CONFERENCE STAGE — SAO PAULO — 2019 — DAY
LEMANN stands before an audience of Brazilian business leaders. He is older now. The competitive fire is still there, but tempered with something new — humility.
LEMANN
I am a dinosaur. I come from an era when the model was simple — buy, cut, optimize, repeat. The new world is different. Technology companies grow by investing, not by cutting. I am trying to learn. At eighty, I am trying to learn.
The audience is stunned. The most feared cost-cutter in global business is admitting vulnerability.
EXT. ZURICH — SWITZERLAND — PRESENT DAY — DUSK
LEMANN walks along the shores of Lake Zurich. The Swiss-Brazilian dual citizen in his adopted home. Behind him, the legacy: AB InBev — the world's largest brewer. Kraft Heinz — one of the world's largest food companies. Burger King — revitalized and global. Restaurant Brands International. A philosophy that reshaped American capitalism.
LEMANN (V.O.)
We were three Brazilians who believed that discipline could conquer any market. We were right — for a time. We took over Budweiser, Heinz, Burger King, Kraft. We showed the world that a company from Brazil could outperform the best in America. But the lesson of Kraft Heinz is the lesson of life itself. You cannot only subtract. At some point, you must add. You must create. You must grow. Zero-based budgeting works. But life cannot be zero-based.
FADE TO BLACK.
Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles, and Carlos Alberto Sicupira — through 3G Capital — orchestrated some of the largest acquisitions in business history, including Anheuser-Busch ($52B), H.J. Heinz ($23B), and the Kraft-Heinz merger. Their zero-based budgeting approach has been adopted by companies worldwide. AB InBev remains the world's largest brewer. Lemann's net worth has been estimated at over $15 billion. He remains one of the most influential — and debated — figures in global business.