“Buying well is a discipline,” Carlos Slim once told a newspaper reporter. He has spent more than half a century proving it, usually when everyone else was selling.
A boy with a savings book
Slim was born in Mexico City on January 28, 1940, the fifth of six children. His father, Julian Slim Haddad, had emigrated from Lebanon in 1902 and ran a chain of stores while buying up real estate. He taught his son to write down every peso of allowance in a savings book. Carlos traded baseball cards with friends and logged the profits, opened his first checking account at twelve and bought his first shares the same year. He took a civil engineering degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1961, worked as an engineer for a few years, then decided finance was what he really wanted. In April 1966 he married Soumaya Domit Gemayel. By the end of that year, EBSCO’s Research Starters says, he was already worth $400,000.
Immobiliaria Carso, his first company, was incorporated in January 1966. Its name came from the first syllables of Carlos and Soumaya. Real estate, a construction equipment firm, a printing shop, a copper mine and the cigarette maker Cigatam came next, each financed by profits from the last. In 1980 he pulled it all under a holding company, Grupo Carso.
Buying in a panic
The 1982 crash made him. Mexico defaulted on its foreign debts, the peso was devalued and the government began nationalizing banks. Prices of Mexican companies collapsed, and Slim went shopping. He picked up stakes in the local units of Reynolds Aluminum, General Tire and Rubber, Anderson Clayton and Firestone, and his biggest purchases were the insurer Seguros de Mexico and Sanborns, which grew into the country’s largest retail and restaurant chain. Britannica notes that he reached billionaire status in the aftermath of that crash. He repeated the trick later in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia during national crises.
Then came Telmex. In 1990 the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari privatized the national telephone monopoly, and Slim, together with SBC and France Telecom, made the $1.76 billion purchase. He later won management control, which soured relations with France Telecom. He replaced managers, trained staff, put billions into infrastructure and pegged Telmex rates to the U.S. dollar to protect against devaluation. By 2001 the company was capitalized at $27 billion. The wireless arm, America Movil, was split off that year, and by 2007 it was Latin America’s largest mobile operator with 143.4 million subscribers.
Newspapers, Pemex and the criticism
Not every bet worked. Slim bought the ailing electronics firm CompUSA in 2000, misjudged his ability to fix it, and sold it in 2007, which Britannica calls a rare misstep. In October 2008 he lent The New York Times Company $250 million in return for ten-year notes with warrants. When he exercised them in January 2015 he became the largest holder of the paper’s publicly traded shares, though the Sulzberger family still controlled 90 percent of the unlisted class B stock.
On March 10, 2010, Forbes ranked him the richest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at $53.5 billion. At that point his roughly two hundred companies made up about 40 percent of the value of the Mexican stock exchange. In 2015 he founded Carso Oil & Gas, and in September 2025 Grupo Carso signed a deal with Pemex to finance drilling of up to 32 wells at the Ixachi field, valued at around $1.99 billion. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index put his net worth at $129 billion.
Critics have long accused him of an octopus-like grip on the Mexican economy and of crony capitalism around Telmex. Slim answers by pointing to the 218,000 workers his companies employ. He also keeps a modest home in Mexico City, with his children’s houses around it. His wife Soumaya died in 1999. He is a baseball fan and an art collector, and in 1994 he opened the Museo Soumaya, which holds about sixty-six thousand works, including sculptures by Rodin. His foundation works on health, sports and education, and he has said that direct charity alone is unlikely to cure the structural causes of poverty.
Sources
- Carlos Slim Helú | Biography & Facts | Britannica Money
- Carlos Slim | Biography | Research Starters | EBSCOhost
