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Even before coffee began to give out, Sáo Paulo's industry got a running start from one of the greatest engineering feats on earth. The city stands near the Atlantic brink of a broad plateau whose rivers drain away to the west and finally to the sea 1,000 miles away in Argentina. In 1922, Asa Billings, an Omaha-born, Harvard-educated engineer for Sáo Paulo's Canadian-owned power company, got the idea of damming these rivers and guiding their waters back over the 2,400-ft. palisades to the Atlantic. Magnificently successful, Billings' complex of tunnels, pumps, penstocks and turbines at Serra do Mar produced more electricity than any but the world's two or three biggest dams and made possible the industrial prodigies that Paulistas have since accomplished.
Cutting the Pie. Today, the state of Sáo Paulo's 34,000 factories and 700.000 industrial workers turn out half of Brazil's industrial goods. The city consumes more electric power per residential customer than Chicago. Nearly half Brazil's foreign trade funnels through the port of Santos. Sáo Paulo makes 10 million shirts a year, 1,500,000 tires, 721 elevators, 1,000,000 aluminum automobile pistons.
In the clanging metropolis of lathes, spindles and plentiful credit, fortunes are made in a few years. Most enterprisers expand frenetically, cut the pie in a quick, cold-eyed killing, then move on to bigger things. Declared industrial profits average 18%—but many a Paulista would not touch a deal for less than 100%. Taxes are low, and collection is lax. In an atmosphere as favorable to freewheeling enterprise as the U.S. in President Grant's time, 100% profit is an attainable goal. At least 500 Paulistas have made their million (in terms of U.S. dollars), and 1,000 more are nearing the mark.
Of all Sáo Paulo's freewheelers, the biggest and freest is Count Francisco Matarazzo Jr., 51, who may well enjoy the world's largest personal income (after taxes). From his pigskin-paneled countinghouse above Sáo Paulo's Viaducto do Chá, the count* runs his 300 enterprises (textiles, cereals, shipping, refining) in the style of a 16th century Florentine prince. Big, bleak and impeccably dressed, the count operates from a deep couch in the corner of his immense office. Across the room is a board with vertical lines of electric buttons. At a sign from the count, an attendant leaps forward, then leaps back to punch whichever button the count indicates. The buzzer-button system calls the count's top executives into his presence. The employee answers the count's question, receives his instructions, then bows his way backward from the count's presence, careful to avoid a pratfall over a wastebasket or another vice president.