Lorenzo Mendoza is the third generation of the family that controls Empresas Polar, Venezuela's largest privately held company, founded by his grandfather as a beer company in 1941.
Mendoza attended the Hun School of Princeton in New Jersey, and went on to receive a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Fordham University, and an MBA in 1993 from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
In 2009 Polar was a casualty of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's land reform schemes when the government took over one of the company's properties claiming the land was being underused.
As of November 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$2.7 billion.
