Vorcaro’s Party: A New Investigation

Daniel Vorcaro apparently took networking very seriously.

On October 31, 2023, a Halloween party in São Paulo organized for Vorcaro, then the controlling shareholder of the Brazilian bank Banco Master, brought together about 120 women and 20 men, according to messages made public from material examined by Brazil’s Federal Police.

Six to one.

Since I’m married, I’ll analyze that ratio strictly from the standpoint of political science.

My wife reads my articles, too.

The episode would amount to little more than private extravagance—and probably make a much less interesting story for this essay—if it weren’t part of a much broader investigation into Daniel Vorcaro and Banco Master.

In 2026, the release of reports based on Vorcaro’s seized cellphone revealed messages involving government officials, politicians, businesspeople, and members of the judiciary. Among the disclosures, the Federal Police identified conversations in which Vorcaro allegedly sought to use his closeness to Alexandre de Moraes, a justice on Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, to obtain information about the progress of the investigations. In one of them, according to the police, he even asked whether he should leave Brazil.

We should hit the brakes before stepping on the gas.

An investigation is underway. Messages and documents have actually been found and examined. The Federal Police have offered interpretations of some of that material. Some of the people named dispute those interpretations, deny involvement in particular episodes, or give different accounts. And as I write, there is no final judicial ruling that allows us to turn the entire collection into a ready-made verdict.

That distinction isn’t legal nitpicking.

It’s exactly the kind of distinction that tends to disappear when politics hits the internet and everyone gets fifteen seconds to become Brazil’s prosecutor general.

The party, however, did happen. Reporting by the Brazilian magazine piauí, based on messages included in the police report, described how the work of organizing it was divided. Former cabinet minister Fábio Faria appears handling the male guests; event promoter Tiago Polo, the women. Conversations mention Brazilian senators Davi Alcolumbre and Rodrigo Pacheco and Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli, among others. Being mentioned in a conversation does not prove that each person named attended—and some of those publicly linked to the episode have denied participating.

There was also a distinctly contemporary rule for a party meant to stay discreet: cellphones were to be kept out.

The plan worked so well that, three years later, we’re reading messages about the party arrangements on the host’s seized phone.

Technology has a sense of humor.

A party and a much less exciting word

The description attracts attention for the public officials, the luxury, the guest ratio, and, naturally, the 120 women.

But set aside, for a few minutes, the glamour, the DJs, the money, the titles, and the potential legal trouble.

What’s left?

A very familiar human activity.

Networking.

Career books have recommended it for decades. Courses teach it. Consultants repeat it. LinkedIn has practically turned the practice into digital infrastructure.

Meet people.

Build relationships.

Get out there.

Talk.

Be remembered.

An employee at one company meets someone from another. That acquaintance works near HR. Months later, a position opens up. Before the listing even reaches hundreds of applicants, a message travels through the network:

“I thought of you. They’re looking for someone with your background.”

Nothing necessarily wrong has happened.

Something good may have happened. Information circulated. Someone found an opportunity. A company found a professional.

Now add a closer relationship.

The employee personally knows the person hiring. They’ve worked together before. They trust each other. The head of HR knows this candidate delivers what they promise.

Should that trust count?

Probably.

How much should it count?

Now it gets more interesting.

What if another candidate has stronger technical qualifications but is unknown?

What if friendship carries more weight than competence?

What if trust gives way to favoritism?

At what point does a legitimate network of relationships cross an ethical line? At what point does it cross a legal one?

There’s no single answer for every case. There are contexts, rules, duties, conflicts of interest, and different degrees of power.

But notice the progression: we started with ordinary career-development advice and, without changing the relational nature of the scene, arrived at merit, influence, privilege, and power.

Now replace the employee with the banker.

Replace the head of HR with politicians, cabinet ministers, businesspeople, and public officials.

Replace the job opening with decisions that can affect banks, regulations, investigations, contracts, and billions of reais.

The dynamic doesn’t become alien.

The scale changes dramatically.

And when the scale changes, so do the consequences and the obligations.

Politics begins long before Brasília

When we hear the word politics, we tend to picture Congress, parties, elections, presidents, corruption, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, and the left and right arguing as though the planet’s survival depended on who shouts the loudest.

All of that is part of politics.

But politics predates the buildings where we institutionalize it—including those in Brasília, Brazil’s capital.

At its most basic, politics appears when human beings need to organize life together, decisions, resources, rules, interests, and power.

A family does this.

A company does this.

A neighborhood association does this.

A church does this.

A university does this.

Even a conversation at a bar can acquire a small political dimension when it stops being an exchange of ideas and starts involving persuasion, reputation, alliances, and a contest over whose interpretation the group will accept.

That doesn’t make an argument about soccer at a bar equivalent to a vote in Brazil’s Senate.

Different things can share a dynamic without becoming equivalent.

That sentence will matter later.

The president who would have to know everything

Imagine a family.

A father, a mother, three children, and a dog that, for unknown reasons, has decided to take an active role in household management.

The father gets home.

His first child, a daughter, asks whether that new crack in the wall means the house might have a structural problem.

His second child, a son, has taken a medication and developed an odd skin reaction.

The third wants to know whether it makes more sense to pay for a computer in full or use an installment plan and invest the money left over.

His wife reports that the electricity bill has gone way up and asks whether the wiring could be the problem.

At that moment, the dog throws up after eating something in the yard.

It’s 6:12 p.m.

By 6:15, to govern his own living room properly, our citizen would need to master structural engineering, pharmacology, medicine, finance, electricity, and veterinary medicine.

By 6:20, the Wi-Fi might act up, requiring him to add computer networking to his résumé.

It’s not going to happen.

Human knowledge has become too vast to fit inside a single head. We train engineers, doctors, economists, physicists, lawyers, mechanics, electricians, programmers, and thousands of other specialists precisely because learning something in depth takes time.

Now expand the household to more than two hundred million inhabitants.

Add defense, health care, education, energy, agriculture, industry, the environment, foreign affairs, science, infrastructure, public safety, taxation, social security, telecommunications, and enough other subjects to make the crack in the wall seem relaxing.

A president doesn’t run a country the way a driver runs a car.

He doesn’t turn the wheel to the right and have two hundred million people make a coordinated turn.

Governing means operating within systems made up of other systems.

That’s why there are cabinet ministers.

And ministers have secretaries.

Secretaries have advisers.

Advisers depend on technical experts.

Technical experts depend on information produced by other structures.

And that brings us to a fundamental feature of complex organizations:

nobody sees everything.

Information moves up the pyramid, but it doesn’t arrive intact

Imagine a company.

An employee notices a problem.

Tells the supervisor.

The supervisor informs the manager.

The manager prepares a summary for the director.

The director takes the matter to the CEO.

The CEO presents it to the board.

If every stage perfectly reproduced all the reality that came before it, the board meeting would begin on Tuesday and end sometime after Christmas.

So systems compress information.

Select it.

Summarize it.

Classify it.

Prioritize it.

And people do the work.

People have limited knowledge, interpretations, incentives, fears, ambitions, careers, and relationships.

That doesn’t mean everyone lies to the boss.

It means something more ordinary and more important: information passes through human and institutional filters.

Sometimes an employee plays down a problem for fear of being blamed.

Sometimes a manager emphasizes another because they need funding.

Sometimes a technical expert sounds the right alarm and nobody higher up understands how serious it is.

Sometimes an organization builds excellent mechanisms to reduce these filters.

Sometimes it makes a PowerPoint presentation.

Governments face the same problem on a much larger scale.

That’s why the image of the all-knowing leader is as seductive as it is unrealistic.

Donald Trump doesn’t personally know every operational detail of the United States.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva doesn’t know every decision made by Brazil’s bureaucracy.

Xi Jinping doesn’t individually monitor every factory, municipal government, and public office in China.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t single-handedly administer every dimension of the Russian state.

These countries have profoundly different political structures. Their degrees of centralization, institutional control, political competition, press freedom, bureaucratic autonomy, and constraints on the leader also differ.

But none of these men stopped depending on systems because he reached the top of one.

Power doesn’t eliminate dependence.

It often just changes which dependencies we’re talking about.

And economics? It was in the room all along

Economics tends to suffer from the same reputation problem as politics.

The word comes up and we immediately picture interest rates, inflation, central banks, charts, economists on television, and someone saying “yield curve” with a confidence that makes us pretend we understand.

But economics begins long before that, too.

Resources are limited.

Desires are not.

Choices have to be made.

A family decides whether to replace the car or renovate the house.

A child shares a package of cookies with a sibling and discovers that resource distribution can produce social instability in under thirty seconds.

A couple chooses between spending today and saving for tomorrow.

A company decides whether to hire or automate.

A government decides where to tax and where to spend.

At different scales, we find scarcity, preferences, exchange, production, distribution, risk, and incentives.

Centuries of economic thought have developed these questions into sophisticated theoretical systems. Adam Smith explored markets, specialization, and economic coordination. Marx examined capital, labor, property, and class conflict. Keynes demonstrated the importance of aggregate demand and public intervention in certain crises. Hayek emphasized, among other things, the dispersal of knowledge and the problems of concentrating economic decisions.

It would be absurd to reduce any of them to the kitchen budget.

But it would also be curious to imagine that the kitchen stopped facing economic constraints because it hasn’t read Keynes yet.

Scientific complexity expands the analysis.

It doesn’t create the basic phenomenon being analyzed out of thin air.

Politics and economics didn’t join hands

There’s a familiar phrase: politics and economics go hand in hand.

I like the intention, but perhaps the image doesn’t go far enough.

It suggests two independent things that decided to take a walk together.

In practice, they run through each other.

Businesses depend on laws, contracts, infrastructure, currency, institutional stability, and regulatory decisions.

Governments depend on tax revenue, production, credit, employment, investment, and business activity.

Workers depend on companies and governments in different ways.

Companies depend on workers and consumers.

Governments depend on voters, bureaucracies, economic actors, and conditions they don’t fully control.

Investors want to protect capital.

Politicians want to preserve their ability to govern, their support, and their legitimacy.

Business owners want predictability and opportunities.

Workers want income and security.

Consumers want price, quality, and availability.

Those interests can align, compete, or shift depending on the issue.

And that’s where networking stops being just a career tip.

Relationships are channels through which information, trust, influence, and interests circulate.

Try an experiment before you read on

You don’t have to take my word for it.

Open a financial-information site that shows the shareholding structure of publicly traded companies. Investing.com is a straightforward option.

You can start here, with Nestlé:

https://br.investing.com/equities/nestle-ag-ownership

That link takes you straight to the Nestlé example on the Portuguese-language site. To find other large publicly traded companies, use Investing.com’s search bar.

Search results may include similar company names or shares listed on different exchanges and in different countries. Check that you have selected the company and stock listing you want before continuing.

On the linked site, look under Geral, in the Informação area, for Acionistas, then find Principais acionistas institucionais. On the English interface, the corresponding labels are General, Overview, Ownership, and Top Institutional Holders.

When I checked the data, Nestlé’s major institutional investors included UBS Asset Management, BlackRock, Vanguard, Capital Research, and Norges Bank Investment Management.

Now try this.

Search for Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Pfizer. Beverages, technology, and medicine: three familiar companies in different sectors.

For each one, open Top Institutional Holders and compare the names with those you found at Nestlé.

Which ones recur? Notice where BlackRock and Vanguard appear.

Then pick another large publicly traded company that comes to mind and repeat the search.

Some names will start showing up again.

The experiment is more useful than saying “everything belongs to everyone,” because that would be both catchy and bad.

Companies are, in fact, deeply connected through capital markets, funds, banks, asset managers, suppliers, customers, boards, investors, and supply chains.

But we need to distinguish different things.

An asset manager is not necessarily the ultimate beneficial owner of those assets.

Holding shares does not mean running a company single-handedly.

Managing trillions of dollars for other people does not mean personally owning those trillions.

And an index fund doesn’t operate like a corporate monarch issuing daily orders to the companies in its portfolio.

Even so, concluding that no influence exists would be just as naive.

BlackRock, Vanguard, and the problem with “owner”

BlackRock and Vanguard are among the world’s largest asset managers. Their funds appear as shareholders in thousands of companies because they manage money for investors, retirement funds, institutions, and ordinary people.

That creates a curious situation.

We ask:

“Who owns the company?”

We find funds.

We ask:

“Who’s behind the funds?”

We find management structures, fund shareholders, institutional investors, and, in many cases, millions of ultimate beneficiaries.

“Who’s the owner?” starts losing its simplicity.

Vanguard is particularly interesting because its structure is unusual: the company is owned by Vanguard funds, and the economic ownership of those funds belongs to their investors.

BlackRock, in turn, is a publicly traded company with shareholders of its own.

The network doesn’t come to a tidy end in a dark room where three people set the world’s tomato prices.

Reality has the inconvenient habit of being more complicated than a good conspiracy theory.

Conspiracies exist. People have been conspiring ever since they learned to have conversations without inviting everyone to the meeting.

But conspiracy is one possibility within human relationships, not a universal explanation for them.

The broader phenomenon here is something else: concentrated resources create the capacity to act; economic stakes create interests; interests encourage relationships; relationships can generate influence.

Influence is not absolute control.

But it isn’t nothing, either.

Large asset managers exercise voting power on corporate matters, engage with companies, operate in markets, interact with regulators and governments, and manage positions whose value depends on economic and political conditions.

If you manage or own a substantial amount of resources exposed to a particular sector, it’s quite natural to want that sector not to be destroyed on Thursday.

If you have access to people who can affect the conditions of that investment, it’s equally natural to want to talk to them.

That’s where laws, transparency rules, conflicts of interest, lobbying, governance, ethics, and legal limits come in.

Not because money is an evil substance.

Because money is the capacity to do things—and the capacity to do things is a form of power.

States network, too

Now increase the scale again.

Presidents travel.

Prime ministers receive delegations.

Foreign ministers arrange meetings.

Businesspeople accompany official missions.

Countries take part in forums, alliances, treaties, and multilateral organizations.

Heads of state dine together, shake hands, speak privately, and build channels that may prove useful when a crisis arises.

We call this diplomacy, international relations, strategic negotiation.

It isn’t the same thing as a banker’s private party.

But some basic dynamics reappear: access, trust, the circulation of information, relationship-building, interests, reciprocity, and the capacity to influence.

Different things can share a dynamic without becoming equivalent.

When the United States negotiates with China, there isn’t simply “the United States” on one side and “China” on the other, like two people sitting at a table.

There are governments, ministries, companies, workers, consumers, armed forces, supply chains, investors, parties, bureaucracies, technologies, international alliances, and groups whose interests partly align and partly conflict.

A tariff can protect one industry and hurt another.

A technology restriction can benefit one sector and raise costs in another.

A decision that strengthens a country’s geopolitical position can create losses for particular companies within it.

So the American president doesn’t simply choose whatever he “wants.”

He operates within a web of pressures, information, institutions, and interests.

The same principle applies, within very different political structures, to Xi Jinping in China or Vladimir Putin in Russia.

The more centralized a system, the greater the center’s formal or practical ability may be to impose certain decisions.

But centralization doesn’t turn millions of people, organizations, resources, and pieces of information into a perfect extension of the leader’s mind.

No ruler escapes complexity simply by having more power.

Power also depends on who needs whom more

There’s another important element in relationships: dependence.

Imagine two people negotiating.

One desperately needs to close the deal today.

The other can walk away and come back next month.

Who has more room to maneuver?

Usually, the one who needs it less.

That asymmetry appears at work, in companies, in markets, and in relations between countries.

An employee with five job offers negotiates differently from someone who has to pay the rent tomorrow.

A company with dozens of alternative suppliers negotiates differently from one dependent on a single source of raw materials.

A country that controls technology, financing, natural resources, military capabilities, consumer markets, or important logistics chains has tools that another may not.

Power isn’t something kept in a drawer.

It’s relational.

It depends on what an actor can do, what others need, the available alternatives, and the context.

That helps explain why money, information, office, reputation, technology, knowledge, and relationships can function as different forms of capacity.

And why none of them operates entirely on its own.

Back to the party

After all that, perhaps it’s time to return to the 120 women and 20 men.

The party hasn’t changed.

We’ve changed the lens.

At first, there was an extravagant story involving a banker, officials mentioned in messages, banned cellphones, and a guest ratio that would make any statistician ask exactly what experimental hypothesis was being tested.

Now we can look at the same scene and see other layers.

A network of contacts.

Access.

Reputation.

Information.

Trust.

Economic interests.

Political power.

The possibility of influence.

Legal rules.

Ethical limits.

None of that, by itself, proves a crime took place at that party.

A relationship isn’t automatically corruption.

A conversation isn’t automatically influence peddling.

Knowing someone powerful isn’t a crime.

Throwing an extravagant party isn’t, in itself, evidence of an illegal operation, either.

That’s precisely why investigations exist: to distinguish social relationships, legitimate acts, conflicts of interest, favors, and conduct that may cross legal boundaries.

But pretending relationships don’t matter would also be naive.

If they didn’t, nobody would write books about networking.

Companies wouldn’t hire government-relations professionals.

Governments wouldn’t maintain diplomatic services.

Industries wouldn’t form associations.

Politicians wouldn’t build alliances.

And bankers would probably save quite a bit on parties.

Perhaps the mistake is always looking for someone running everything

When we look at very large systems, we have an understandable tendency to search for a center.

Who’s in charge?

Who controls it?

Who owns it?

Who decided?

Sometimes there are clear answers.

Someone signed the order.

A board approved the acquisition.

A court issued the ruling.

A president signed the bill into law.

But in complex systems, the final decision is often just the visible point in a much larger chain.

Before it came information, pressures, negotiations, alternatives, constraints, interests, expert opinions, relationships, and choices made at different levels.

That doesn’t dissolve individual responsibility.

Quite the opposite.

It helps us locate it more accurately.

If we imagine that a president controls absolutely everything, we end up crediting or blaming him both for what he actually decided and for what he never even knew about.

If we imagine that a large asset manager single-handedly controls every company its funds invest in, we fail to understand ownership, governance, and management.

If we imagine that personal relationships never influence institutional decisions, we ignore an obvious part of human behavior.

Systems analysis requires resisting all three simplifications at once.

Kitchen politics and living-room economics

Perhaps we can return to the family from the beginning.

The crack is still in the wall.

The dog is probably at the vet by now.

Now imagine that the family has enough money to solve only two of the four problems that month.

Enter economics.

Each person considers their problem the most urgent.

Enter politics.

The daughter argues that the crack threatens the entire house.

The son says he needs the computer for school.

The wife points out that the electricity bill will keep coming.

Someone has to set priorities.

There are limited resources, incomplete information, different interests, and some structure for making decisions.

At the core, we aren’t so far from questions that arise in much larger organizations.

We are worlds apart in scale, complexity, institutions, and consequences.

But certain basic relationships remain recognizable.

That’s why politics and economics can seem both simple and extraordinarily complex.

The simplicity lies in the fundamental relationships.

The complexity emerges from the number of actors, connections, rules, pieces of information, and accumulated effects.

A conversation between two people can already contain negotiation.

Two hundred million people organized through millions of relationships produce something none of them can individually see in full.

The world won’t fit into a single perspective

We can look at Daniel Vorcaro solely through a legal lens.

It’s necessary.

We can look through a political lens.

That, too.

An economic one.

A psychological one.

A sociological one.

An organizational one.

Through network theory.

Through institutional governance.

Each lens reveals something and hides something else.

The trouble begins when a useful perspective presents itself as a complete description of reality.

“It was just networking.”

Perhaps not.

“It was necessarily corruption.”

Investigations and legal proceedings exist precisely because we shouldn’t replace evidence with the desire to reach a conclusion.

“Big funds control everything.”

No.

“Big funds have no meaningful influence because they manage other people’s money.”

That would also be a simplification.

“Presidents run countries.”

Yes, in important senses.

“Presidents control everything that happens in their countries.”

Obviously not.

Reality seems to have little respect for statements that work perfectly in a single line.

The party got more crowded

At the start of this article, there were 140 people at a party: 120 women and 20 men.

At least, that was the ratio recorded in the messages about organizing the event.

Now the room is much more crowded.

In came politics, economics, psychology, hierarchy, information, reputation, trust, dependence, markets, institutions, funds, governments, companies, workers, investors, presidents, and a few hundred million people no president can individually manage before dinner.

Vorcaro’s party was just the doorway.

Behind it lay a much larger question:

how does power circulate through human systems?

I didn’t find a person sitting in a chair controlling everything.

I found networks.

People within organizations.

Organizations within systems.

Systems running through other systems.

Interests that align on one issue and clash on the next.

Relationships that may be legitimate, useful, questionable, or illegal depending on what actually happens through them.

And different forms of power that reinforce or constrain one another.

Perhaps understanding politics and economics begins when we stop treating them as things that happen only to cabinet ministers, bankers, and presidents.

They appear in basic forms whenever people need to live together, choose, negotiate, distribute resources, and influence decisions.

Then we increase the scale.

Add more actors.

More rules.

More resources.

Greater consequences.

And at some point, what began in the kitchen acquires a central bank, a parliament, a stock exchange, and a party with the electronic-music group Swedish House Mafia—because apparently even power relations need world-famous DJs.

The guiding principle, though, remains useful:

different things can share a dynamic without becoming equivalent.

And thinking in systems may be exactly that: being able to change the scale of the lens without forgetting what changed along with it.

If you want to test the idea, you don’t need to wait for the next Federal Police investigation.

Watch the next meeting at work.

The next family argument.

The next news story about a company.

The next negotiation between two countries.

Ask who has information, who depends on whom, what resources are at stake, what relationships already existed, who can decide, who can influence, and who only appears to be in charge.

Then change the lens.

Another story will probably emerge.

And if someone invites you to a party with six women for every man, do what I would do.

Check with the legal department first.

And, in my case, my wife.