Originally published 2007, part of a series I did for a biography website. Can’t even remember who now, but it’s long gone.
Carlos Slim Helú has been ranked in the top ten of the world’s richest people, for a while jockeying for top three with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. At the age of 67, Fortune magazine ranked him as the world’s richest man, though afterwards he has slipped to number two with estimated wealth of $60 billion USD. The surprising thing is that he has done so in Mexico, a country not at all known for its wealth and not on anyone’s top list of countries hosting billionaires or even millionaires. As we will find out with Carlos Slim Helú, the surprises just never stop coming.
His story begins with a 14-year-old Lebanese immigrant named Youssef Salim who moved to Mexico City, Mexico, and changed his name to Julián Slim Haddad in 1902. He spoke no Spanish, and was immigrating to flee the Ottoman Empire, on the insistence of his mother who sent him off before he could be drafted into the military there. Beginning his life in this manner, the boy grew up to start a dry goods store and buy some real estate. He went on to marry, eventually fathering six children.
The youngest of this family was Carlos Slim Helú, born January 28, 1940. Carlos was to study to be an engineer at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he also taught Algebra and Linear Programming at the same time he was studying for his degree. He completed his studies in 1961 with a civil engineering degree, but already had a net worth of $400,000, in part starting from his first stock purchase at the tender age of 12! He founded his first company, Grupo Carso, in 1965 out of two acquired smaller companies. By 1967, he had already founded a brokerage house, a real estate firm, a construction company, and a soda bottling plant.
Leveraging this scatter-shoot of business ventures, he steadily ascended the corporate ladder through the next two decades. He purchased numerous other companies throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s. In 1976, he purchased a 60% share of a cigarette-pack label-printing plant named Galas de México. In 1980, he incorporated Grupo Carso into a public company, and changed its name to Grupo Galas. In 1981, he became the majority stockholder in Cigarros la Tabacelera Mexicana, Mexico’s second largest cigarette manufacturer.
Mexico is not an easy country to build a fortune in, and Carlos Slim Helú seemed to take that into account, while at the same time pursuing aggressive business and investing strategies so that he was always ahead of every dip in the economy. When, as a result of the Oil Crisis of the 1970’s, Mexico defaulted on its external debt in 1982 and experienced devaluation of the peso, Helú bought controlling interests in many Mexican companies cheaply, mainly using the revenues from Cigarros la Tabacelera. These companies included a mining firm, a copper product manufacturer, a tire company, and Sanborn Hermanos, a retail and restaurant chain. Indeed, the variety of business ventures could fill a book in itself.
The turning point for Helú, already a millionaire by this time, came in 1990 when he acquired Telmex, also known as Teléfonos de México S.A.B. de C.V., from the Mexican government under then-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Telmex became Helú’s greatest cash-earner, since the telecommunications company operates basically as a legal monopoly. Telmex provides much of Latin America with land-line telephone service, mobile phone service under the brand name of América Móvil, Internet service under the brand Telmex Internet Directo Personal, and most recently television through Internet protocol.
Today, Carlos Slim Helú remains the most powerful business mogul in Mexico, with holdings or interests in virtually every possible market and industry. It is virtually impossible for a citizen of Mexico to spend even a little money without some of the profit going to Helú, whether it’s for a night at a motel, a bottle of pop, a car, a shirt, a ticket to a ball game, or a computer. His three sons, Carlos Slim Domit, Marco Antonio Slim Domit and Patrick Slim Domit, today do most of the managing of his many businesses and holdings.
Helú is a contender for the most amazing success story in the history of business. Starting from being the son of an immigrant shopkeeper, he has worked a step at a time to build a corporate empire from scratch. He has since won many awards and honors from the Mexican government, devoting a great deal of charitable donation and time as an activist towards improving the quality of life in his adopted country.
