Beckmann is chairman of Becle, a publicly traded holding company that controls Jose Cuervo, the world's biggest tequila maker. His family are the biggest shareholders in the Mexico City-based company, which reported net sales of $2.3 billion in 2022. They also own Proximo Spirits, a Mexican alcohol distributor.
The majority of Beckmann's fortune is derived from Mexico City-based Becle, the holding company that controls Jose Cuervo, the world's biggest tequila maker. Cuervo began trading publicly as Becle SAB on Feb. 9, 2017 and reported revenue of 45.7 billion pesos ($2.3 billion) in 2022.
Beckmann and his family own about 86% of Becle, according to its 2022 annual report. In May 2019, Beckmann transferred bare legal title to a 35% stake in the company to his daughter, but he still controls the stake's voting rights, according to a news release, and remains company chairman.
Carlos Suarez, a spokesman for Cuervo, declined to comment on the net worth calculation.
Beckmann Vidal, the grandson of a German ambassador to Mexico and an heiress to the Cuervo tequila fortune, grew up in the border city of Tijuana, selling margaritas by the gallon at a hotel and hawking sombreros to tourists at the bull ring. After graduating from Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, he moved back to Tequila, in the state of Jalisco, where he oversaw the agave fields on horseback and worked on accounts by night, according to a 2005 profile of Beckmann by CNN Expansion.
Now one of Mexico's richest tycoons, he's also been a member of the Grupo Financiero Banamex board and holds a stake in Chicago-based Byline Bank along with fellow billionaire Antonio Del Valle. An April 2015 Fitch report said he owns 70 percent of JB y Compania, the Cuervo holding company that was merged into Becle in November 2015. The remaining 30 percent of the business is owned by his son.
The opening of Hotel Solar de las Animas in October shows that the billionaire hasn't shied away from his dream of bringing 1.5 million tourists per year to Tequila by 2020, up from 230,000 in 2015. In a rare televised speech he gave in 2011, he credited a popular 2007 telenovela and its alluring agave-harvesting protagonist for having jump started local tourism (the lead was played by Mexico's first lady at the time).