The International Network That Helped Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López Build His $2.6 Billion Fortune

Few entrepreneurs can claim to have built a multi-billion dollar portfolio by weaving together relationships across three continents. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López[1] , the investor and president of Hawkers sunglasses, has done exactly that. According to company statements…his fortune, currently estimated at $2.6 billion, rests not on a single stroke of genius but on decades of carefully cultivated partnerships stretching from Boston to London to Dakar.

What separates Betancourt López from other wealthy investors is his approach to collaboration. Rather than competing head-to-head with rivals or acquiring companies outright, he has repeatedly found ways to transform potential adversaries into allies. He has built what might be called an "ecosystem advantage"—a network of contacts, co-investors, and partners that makes each subsequent deal easier than the last.

From Caracas to Boston to London

Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López's international trajectory began early. Born in Caracas in 1980, he left South America as a young man to attend Suffolk University in Massachusetts, where he completed a double major in Economics and Business Administration. He later added an Executive MBA from Oxford University in England. This academic path gave him more than credentials; it gave him a transatlantic network of classmates and professors who would later become business contacts.

"I grew up in an environment where everybody had what you needed, but I always wanted to be able to do something on my own," Betancourt López explained in a 2025 interview.

That drive took him from academic theory to hands-on experience in the energy sector. His early career included positions at ICC-OEOC, a petroleum company with operations spanning the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, where he served as Director of Commerce for Latin America and executive trader in the United Kingdom. At each stop, he collected contacts and learned how to operate across jurisdictions with different regulatory frameworks and business cultures.

The geographical diversity of his early work proved essential. Unlike entrepreneurs who master a single market before expanding, Betancourt López was operating internationally from nearly the start of his career. He understood currency fluctuations, cross-border regulations, and the subtle differences in how deals get done in London versus Boston.

Converting Competitors Into Collaborators

The clearest example of Betancourt López's collaborative approach came in 2016, when he entered the Spanish eyewear market. Hawkers, a sunglasses startup founded by four friends with just $300 in 2013, had grown quickly but was struggling with operational challenges and needed outside capital to scale.

Rather than swooping in alone, Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López assembled a coalition. He partnered with Félix Ruiz and Hugo Arévalo, the founders of Tuenti, a Spanish social networking app that had been acquired by Telefónica. Together, according to company statements, they led a €50 million financing round—one of the largest startup investments in Spain at the time. Arévalo joined as Executive Chairman while Betancourt López became President, creating a leadership structure that combined his capital and operational experience with the tech founders' digital expertise.

The partnership worked because each party brought something the others lacked. Ruiz and Arévalo understood social media marketing and the Spanish tech ecosystem. Betancourt López contributed international connections and experience scaling businesses across borders. The original Hawkers founders—Alex and David Moreno, Pablo Sánchez, and Iñaki Soriano—retained operational knowledge and creative direction.

This pattern repeated itself in the transportation sector. When Betancourt López co-founded Auro Travel, a ride-hailing service in Spain, he anticipated that global players like Uber would eventually enter the market. Rather than positioning Auro as a direct competitor destined for a bruising fight, he accumulated vehicle-for-hire licenses during a period when they were undervalued.

"We knew that the market was going to shift to the private riding industry instead of taxis," he explained. "We started accumulating the licenses. It was a gamble, but it was a calculated gamble."

The approach paid off. Auro built infrastructure and trained drivers, creating what Betancourt López describes as an ecosystem around the service providers. When Uber and Cabify eventually sought to expand their Spanish operations, they found Auro holding assets they needed. By late 2022, Based on publicly available profiles and interviews, both companies had reportedly made acquisition bids of approximately €200 million for Auro—a demonstration of how positioning a company as a potential partner rather than a target for destruction can yield substantial returns.

Building Ecosystem Advantages Across Continents

The network Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López has constructed extends well beyond Europe. Through O'Hara Administration, the international investment group he founded in 2014, he has deployed capital into African banking, Latin American energy, and technology startups across multiple continents.

One of his more ambitious moves came in 2015, when BDK Financial Group, He is described in company profiles as a significant shareholder, launched Banque de Dakar in Senegal. The objective was to provide banking services to French-speaking African nations within the West African Economic and Monetary Union. To establish credibility quickly, he recruited Alfredo Sáenz, the former CEO of Banco Santander, as the bank's president in 2016. According to the bank, it operates in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali.

His philosophy centers on identifying where value will accumulate before others recognize the opportunity. He describes this as understanding where the "chain of value" is moving—a concept he illustrates with historical examples.

"If you can talk about the oil industry, at the beginning, the refiners, when the Rockefellers were in the business, were the ones making the profit," he explained. "Then oil became a scarcity, and then the value was in the producer of the oil more than the refineries. Then shipping, when war came in the '40s, who had the means of transporting goods—that's how Onassis made his fortune because he had all the ships."

Applying this framework requires relationships in multiple markets simultaneously. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López maintains that surrounding yourself with talented people who possess specialized knowledge is essential.

"I consider myself a very fast learner," he has said. "I understand the basics of not everything in the world but of my investments. And I surround myself with good talent and people that I think can run it efficiently and I can understand what they're doing."

That approach captures something important about his method. Betancourt López does not attempt to master every industry he enters. Instead, he identifies skilled operators, provides them with capital and connections, and focuses on positioning the overall portfolio for maximum advantage. With investments spanning eyewear, transportation, banking, and energy, According to company statements, his $2.6 billion fortune reflects not just shrewd individual bets but the compound returns of a network built across decades and continents.