Cisneros graduated from Suffield Academy in Connecticut in 1963. He graduated from Babson College in Massachusetts in 1968.

Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros is a privately held Latin American art organization based in Venezuela and New York City. Patricia and Gustavo Cisneros began collecting Latin American abstraction after their marriage, in 1970. Over the years, it has grown to more than 2,000 pieces, including about 200 Spanish colonial objects. In addition, the couple have amassed a vast holding of ethnographic material from the Amazon. Based in New York and Caracas, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros today also includes works by Uruguay’s Joaquín Torres-García, Brazil’s Lygia Clark and Venezuelan modern masters Jesus Soto, Alejandro Otero, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. The Cisneros Foundation was moving toward building a permanent institution in Caracas in the late 1990s until Hugo Chavez was elected president. In 2007, the foundation encountered resistance from the Chavez government when lending works by Venezuelan painter Armando Reveron (1889-1954) to New York’s Museum of Modern Art for the museum’s first retrospective devoted to a single Latin American artist in 50 years.

Although Cisneros and Hugo Chávez were originally friends and Cisneros contributed to Chávez’s first presidential campaigns, Cisernos has been accused of involvement in the 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt against Chávez after their relationship became strained because of Chávez’s confrontation of the media.

In August 2013, Gustavo Cisneros appointed his daughter Adriana Cisneros de Griffin as the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Cisneros.

He has been listed among the world’s richest men according to Forbes magazine, which estimated his fortune at US$1.1 billion in 2019. His wealth has decreased from its 2014 peak of US$4.4 billion.