Argentina’s MercadoLibre King Steps Aside as Latin Fintech Fights Giants

From a quiet street in Montevideo, Marcos Galperin prepares to hand MercadoLibre’s CEO role to Ariel Szarfsztejn, while Mercado Pago chases banking licenses and Amazon, Temu, and Shein circle. Argentina watches, counting jobs, credit, and politics in a volatile region.

Montevideo Hush, Buenos Aires Noise

On a humid morning in Montevideo, Uruguay, Marcos Galperin walks beside Bloomberg Businessweek reporters Brad Stone and Patrick Gillespie. Nobody guards the 54-year-old co-founder of MercadoLibre Inc., Latin America’s most valuable company. Worth about $10 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he seems to savor a rare kind of quiet.

He points to a tennis club, a farmers market, and the beach on the Río de la Plata. At the market, sellers who once insisted on cash now accept Mercado Pago. He says he came for privacy: “In Argentina, they’re asking for pictures, this and that. Uruguay is a paradise for me.” He drives himself.

The distance is small—about a half-hour flight from Buenos Aires—and Galperin calls his neighborhood “like a small Palo Alto,” saying, “I can live freely here.” In the Río de la Plata, crossing water can be a pressure valve: far enough to think.

A Free Market Built on Frictions

Thinking now includes succession. At the end of the year, Galperin will relinquish the CEO title at MercadoLibre and become executive chairman, handing the job to deputy Ariel Szarfsztejn, another Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA. “Real power is choosing when to step away,” he says.

Stone and Gillespie report that the decision cost him tears and complex questions. He wanted to leave while the performance was strong. He says MercadoLibre just posted its 27th straight quarter of 30% or higher revenue growth, adding, “I wanted to control the process.” The Strategic Management Journal has studied founders as both engine and bottleneck.

The engine started in 1999, after Penn’s Wharton School and Stanford in Palo Alto, California, when he returned to Argentina to build an eBay-style marketplace; eBay invested early. He later built Mercado Pago, now used by more than 70 million people to pay in stores, manage money, and buy on credit. He says it lets distant customers “buy the same product at the same price,” “a dream come true for tens of millions.” World Development has debated what that inclusion unlocks—and what it concentrates.

Power After Profit in Argentina

The platform’s scale is continental. With a market capitalization near $105 billion, MercadoLibre operates across 18 countries, runs planes in Brazil and Mexico, and employs more than 100,000—about tenfold the number before Covid-19. Mercado Pago is pursuing banking licenses in Argentina and beyond; without one, he says, “you cannot pay salaries into a digital wallet,” which he calls “quite outrageous.”

Competition is tightening. Amazon.com Inc. partnered with Nu Holdings Ltd. on payments and loans, and MercadoLibre’s stock dropped 8% that day. Galperin says battling Jeff Bezos made his company “a much better company,” pushing it to build more than 30 fulfillment centers. Temu and Shein add another threat, shipping cheap goods directly from Asian factories, often duty-free. He won’t say whether he urged Argentine President Javier Milei to intervene: “You could argue it’s unfair,” he says, but “it’s not up to us to lobby governments for that.”

Asked how his wife, Karina, and their three grown children feel about semiretirement, he pauses: “That’s maybe the toughest question you’ve asked.” He predicts Szarfsztejn will still take his direction: “whatever I think is important, he will listen to me and act accordingly.” Galperin vows to stay focused on MercadoLibre for at least the next five years, chasing artificial intelligence—an adviser inside Mercado Pago that pays bills and invests what’s left, “the best private banker in the world,” for “the average guy.”

Politics has become part of the brand. Stone and Gillespie report that he hosted Milei at MercadoLibre’s office in Buenos Aires, supports his free-market reforms and deep spending cuts, and hopes broader reforms will clear Argentina’s Congress. He calls the Trump administration’s $20 billion backstop and a free-trade framework “very positive,” saying it will cut tariffs and “enhance competition.” On X, he promotes cryptocurrencies while criticizing wokeism, biased journalism, and immigration policies. “Meritocracy is the way to run a business and to run a country,” he says.

He won’t rule out politics for himself: “I’ve learned to avoid certain words like ‘never’ or ‘always.’” He says the ideology was always embedded in the name MercadoLibre, “free market,” and adds, “it’s always been quite clear what our ideology is.” In a region where apps can become infrastructure overnight, his succession is more than corporate theater. This feature is adapted from Bloomberg Businessweek reporting by Brad Stone and Patrick Gillespie.

Also Read: Puerto Rican Bad Bunny Helps Mexico Fix Ticketmaster’s Broken Gate