Part IThe Story
Two Hundred Pesos a Week
In late January 2012, in an office above Paseo de las Palmas in Mexico City's Lomas de Chapultepec, the richest person on earth rose from a heavy wooden chair and went to find a notebook. He was seventy-two and had recently stepped down from the boards of three of his largest companies. By Forbes' count he had built a $69 billion fortune over nearly five decades. The magazine's editor had come to hear his views on the Greek debt crisis, and he gave them: privatize the highways, invest in labor-intensive small businesses, stop balancing budgets on the backs of schools. Then, the way some old men reach for photographs of grandchildren, Carlos Slim Helú pulled from the shelves a ledger he had kept at seventeen and opened it to show what was written there.
Two hundred pesos a week. That was his pay, in his own hand, for working at the family company. A little further on was another entry: his mother had lent him 5,000 pesos to buy stocks.
The room was a curious place for such a relic, and a perfect one. There was no computer. There never had been. Slim does not read documents on a screen and does not send email. A Brazilian journalist who visited in 2007 found a rectangular table buried in paper, green leather couches, a crystal ashtray and a lighter for the Cohibas he smoked at a rate of at least two a day. She also found his conviction, often repeated, that everything needed to make a business decision should fit on a single sheet of paper. Against one wall stood a sculpture by the Swiss artist Vincenzo Vela, The Last Days of Napoleon, a slumped and dying emperor. It was there, Slim explained, as a reminder that it is always necessary to keep one's feet on the ground. On the shelves sat biographies of Bernard Baruch and J. Paul Getty, alongside a row of dog-eared volumes of baseball statistics.
This is the first thing to understand about the man who, between 2010 and 2013, sat atop the world's wealth rankings ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. He built the largest mobile phone network in Latin America, a business of airwaves and invisible signals, and he kept the books of his life in longhand. He is an accountant who became an emperor and never stopped being an accountant. The ledger records what he earned. It also records what he owed. The empire, if you read the entries in order, starts with a loan from his mother.
He insists the totals do not interest him. When reporters asked in 2007 how his fortune had grown by roughly $20 billion in a single year, he offered a shrug in the form of a sentence: "The stock market goes up ... and down." He has called the question of who is richest irrelevant. "I'm not in a game of football," he said. It is the kind of thing rich men say, and in his case it is also, possibly, true, because what absorbs him is not the sum but the entries — the cash flows, the margins, the cost of a single cataract surgery, the price per minute of a prepaid call, the dividend that can be reinvested before it has the chance, as he puts it, to evaporate.
The notebook went back on the shelf. The conversation went back to Europe. But the ledger is the right place to begin, because nearly everything that followed — the fire-sale acquisitions, the telephone monopoly, the refusal to build headquarters, the philanthropy run like a cost center, the accusations that the whole of Mexico had become one man's balance sheet — can be read as an extension of a habit a dead father gave a child.
By the Numbers
The Slim Ledger
200 pesosWeekly pay at age 17, recorded in his notebook
$13MPrice of Seguros de México in 1984; the stake was worth $1.5B by 2007
$1.76BWinning bid for Telmex, December 1990
90%Telmex share of Mexican fixed telephone lines by 2006
2010–2013Years Forbes ranked him the richest person in the world
40%Approximate share of the Mexican stock market tied to his companies
$123BNet worth, Bloomberg Billionaires Index, September 2026
The Star of the Orient
The father was born Khalil Salim Haddad Aglamaz on July 17, 1888, in Jezzine, a town in the hills of southern Lebanon, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. The empire conscripted young men into its army, and Lebanese mothers had learned to send their sons away before they turned fifteen. In 1902, at fourteen, alone and speaking no Spanish, Khalil disembarked at Veracruz and made his way to Tampico, where four older brothers — José, Elías, Carlos, and Pedro — had settled in 1898. Somewhere along the way he became Julián Slim Haddad. The new name was a Hispanicized compression of the old one, which is to say that the first act of the Slim fortune was an act of translation.
In 1911, with a brother, Julián opened a dry goods store in Mexico City called La Estrella de Oriente. The Star of the Orient. The name announced its proprietors' origins even as they were becoming something else. The same year, Mexico fell into revolution, a decade of armies, assassinations, and expropriations during which a great deal of foreign capital fled the country.
Julián did not flee. In 1914, at the height of the violence, he bought out his brother's half of the store. "With the country disintegrating," as the Los Angeles Times put it in 1999, he "seized the moment." He began buying property in the commercial district around the Zócalo at fire-sale prices. By 1922 his net worth had reached 1,012,258 pesos, diversified across real estate, businesses, and stocks. Within a few years, by the Times' later reckoning, the shop was worth about $5 million in 1999 dollars and the property its profits bought was worth $20 million. In 1931, during another national emergency, Julián sat as a member of the Chamber of Commerce in a campaign whose slogan was Compre lo que el país produce: buy what the country produces. His son, telling the story at the Universidad Anáhuac in 2005, noted that it marked the beginning of fifty years of Mexican growth at 6.2 percent annually. "Whether this is a coincidence or not," he said, "I do not know."
Remember the year 1914. It will return.
In August 1926 Julián married Linda Helú Atta, who had been born in Parral, Chihuahua, to José Helú and Wadiha Atta, Lebanese immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth century carrying a printing press. With it they founded one of the first Arabic-language magazines for the Lebanese community in Mexico. One British newspaper later characterized the marriage, a little too neatly, as the union of an artsy middle-class girl and a working-class striver. The mother's family had brought words across the ocean. The father had brought nothing but nerve. "It was clear," the paper concluded, "that the influence of his father won out."
The couple had six children: Nour, Alma, Julián, José, Carlos, and Linda. Carlos, born January 28, 1940, was the fifth. Julián gave each of them a ledger and taught them to record every transaction. At twelve, Carlos was writing down how he spent each centavo of his five-peso weekly allowance. At eleven he had bought a government savings bond and discovered compound interest. At twelve he bought shares in a Mexican bank. He watched his father buy merchandise abroad and resell it in the store. He later distilled the man's teaching into two maxims that appear, nearly verbatim, among the ten principles still circulated to every executive of Grupo Carso: firm and patient optimism always yields its rewards, and all times are good times for those who know how to work and have the tools to do so.
Julián Slim died in 1953, when Carlos was thirteen. The Academy of Achievement's biographical sketch describes the years that followed only as "difficult," and Slim has never said much more in public. What is clear is that the instruction outlived the instructor. The boy kept the books. He still keeps them.
His eldest brother, also named Julián, would live to seventy-four, a businessman who also worked in one of Mexico's intelligence agencies, and die in February 2011. It was the year the youngest of Julián Senior's sons celebrated the twentieth anniversary of owning the national telephone company.
An Education in Fewer Variables
Slim studied civil engineering at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the vast public university in the south of the capital, and while still a student he taught there — algebra, and linear programming. For a time he was simultaneously in the lecture hall and at the lectern. His thesis was on linear programming, the branch of operations research concerned with allocating limited resources to optimize an outcome under constraints.
It is tempting to treat this as biographical decoration, the engineer's degree hanging on the tycoon's wall. Slim insists it was the whole method. "In business, to analyze, it's important to simplify, to have the essential points, the essential issues, the fundamentals, the basics, and take out everything that is secondary, to have less variables to study," he told the Academy of Achievement in 1994. "Because when you have a lot of variables, and you don't make a distinction between the ones that are essential and the secondary ones and parameters, you have confusion." The single sheet of paper is not an affectation. It is a theorem.
He graduated in 1961, took economics courses in Chile, and went to work as a stock trader in Mexico City, frequently putting in fourteen-hour days. By 1965 — the Brazilian magazine Época would later note, with some pointedness, that this was the age when other young men from comfortable families were spending their time in Paris — his trading and private ventures had produced $400,000. He used it, in a single concentrated burst across 1965 and 1966, to found a brokerage, Inversora Bursátil, and to buy a bottler, Jarritos del Sur, and to establish a string of companies with deliberately unglamorous names: a construction firm, a residential developer called Promotora del Hogar, a gravel quarry called Mina el Volcán, an outfit that bought, sold, and rented construction equipment. Inmobiliaria Carso was incorporated in January 1966. At the end of the 1960s he assembled roughly two million square meters of land in the southern part of Mexico City. The state expropriated it in 1989. He has not, in anything I have read, complained about this.
He married Soumaya Domit Gemayel — at the end of 1966 according to his own published chronology, in 1967 according to most other records, a small disagreement of the sort the ledger presumably settles. She was, like him, the child of Lebanese Maronites. The holding company took its name from the first syllables of theirs: Car-los and So-umaya. Carso. It is the only sentimental gesture in the corporate nomenclature, and it has outlasted her by more than a quarter-century.
Then came a quiet decade of the kind that biographies tend to skip. In 1976 he paid $1 million for 60 percent of Galas de México, a printer of labels, calendars, and cigarette packaging, and, in his own phrase, "significantly improved its operations." In 1980 he incorporated Grupo Galas — the entity that would become Grupo Carso — with a specific purpose: to obtain a majority stake in Cigatam, the cigarette manufacturer in which Philip Morris held 29 percent. He got it in 1981.
Cigatam matters more than its modest place in the timelines suggests. It was, as Slim's own corporate history puts it, "the first and most important due to its cash flow." For twenty-five years it gained an average of 1.5 percentage points of market share annually against fierce competition. Cigarettes are an addictive product with stable demand and steady cash, and in 1981 the young conglomerate suddenly had a machine that converted Mexican smokers' habits into reliable liquidity every month. A man who taught linear programming would understand what that meant: a constraint had been relaxed. The next year, the rest of the country's constraints tightened all at once.
All Times Are Good Times
In 1982 Mexico defaulted on its foreign debt. The peso collapsed. On September 1, the outgoing president, José López Portillo, nationalized the banks. Capital that could leave, left; Mexicans who could move their money to Houston or Miami did so. Foreign investors, as Wikipedia's account summarizes with unusual vividness, were "scurrying." The country's finances, in the words of Slim's official chronology, were "almost paralyzed."
Grupo Carso's history records this as the moment "Carso made the decision to invest intensively and actively."
The list of what he bought between 1982 and 1986 reads like an inventory of Mexican industrial capitalism laid out on a sidewalk at closing time. Reynolds Aluminio. The Sanborns chain of restaurants and stores — the house of tiles in the historic center, the counters where Mexico City had eaten breakfast for generations — along with its Denny's affiliate. General Tire de México and Hulera El Centenario Firestone. Bimex hotels. Forty percent of British American Tobacco's Mexican arm, 33 percent of Anderson Clayton, 50 percent of Hershey's in Mexico. Fábricas de Papel Loreto y Peña Pobre, Artes Gráficas Unidas, Pamosa. Then, in 1986, the mining concern Empresas Frisco — for only $50 million — and the copper manufacturer Nacobre, and Química Fluor, and a larger stake in Euzkadi, at the time the country's largest tire maker.
The most instructive purchase was the smallest. In 1984 he paid $13 million for Seguros de México, an insurer, and folded it together with Fianzas La Guardiana and his own brokerage into what became Grupo Financiero Inbursa — which today sells insurance and manages pensions and mutual funds for millions of ordinary Mexicans. By 2007, after four spinoffs, the stake that had cost $13 million was worth $1.5 billion. Much of the rest was paid for, a later company history notes, "mainly using Cigatam's revenues."
The Academy of Achievement, in the reverent register of awards-dinner biography, says that "Carlos Slim's confidence in his country held firm." A less ceremonial account would note that the confidence and the arithmetic pointed in the same direction. Distressed sellers, frozen credit, a buyer with cash: under those conditions the buyer sets the price. Slim's own explanation, offered in Washington in 2007, is notable for how little romance it admits. "To buy it at a low price and in bad condition, it makes it easier," he said. "But the good thing is the potential of the company. How far it can go." Asked whether this was instinct, he said no. "I think more than the instinct, it's knowledge. Look at the numbers. Like I told you, numbers talk."
Here the rhyme becomes impossible to ignore. In 1914, a Lebanese shopkeeper bought out his partner and acquired downtown property while Mexico burned. In 1982, his son bought the country's factories while Mexico went bankrupt. Both stayed when the money fled. Both were, in a sense, foreigners who bet on the nation more fiercely than many natives did — or perhaps bet on it precisely because they had no other nation to retreat to, no family estate in Spain, no inherited account in Texas. The immigrant's child does not have an exit. He has a ledger, and a city, and an intuition about what panic does to prices.
The pattern would repeat for forty years with the regularity of a habit. In 2008, as the American financial system seized, he bought into Citigroup and the New York Times. In March 2015, with Spain's economy still prostrate, he was acquiring Spanish real estate and a stake in the bailed-out bank Bankia. In December 2023, a Fortune headline observed that he had "made a career out of making bullish bets on the country at moments of deep crises." The phrasing undersold it. The crises were not obstacles he overcame. They were the business.
By 1985, Mexico's Chamber of Commerce awarded him its Entrepreneurial Merit Medal of Honor. He was forty-five. Most Mexicans outside the business pages had still never heard of him. That, too, would change, and through a door the government itself would open.
Without Corporative People
When Slim acquired a company, according to one account of Grupo Carso's history, he did several things quickly. He dismissed the management. He sold the corporate headquarters. He moved his own people into nondescript offices at the production sites. Into the 1990s he oversaw the entire conglomerate with roughly a dozen staff members from an unpretentious two-story house in Mexico City.
"We work without corporative people," he said in 2007. "We focus an operation. We take down as many levels as we can, to make the highest level be near the operation." For decades, Grupo Carso did not own a corporate building at all, an absence he explained without apology: the businesses had been industrial, so "the offices were and are at the factories."
The philosophy has been codified into ten principles, distributed — the official site specifies — to relatives, colleagues, employees, and the work force. Some read like any company's values statement. Several do not. Maintaining austerity in good times strengthens, profits and accelerates the development of the company and averts the bitterly drastic adjustments in times of crisis. Companies should never be limited by the size of the owner or manager. Do not feel big in our small corral. Minimize investment in non-productive assets. Money that leaves the company evaporates; this is why we reinvest profits. And the last, which reads less like management doctrine than like an epitaph: Our premise is and has always been that we leave with nothing; that we can only do things while we are alive and that businessmen are creators of the wealth they temporarily manage.
Marco Antonio Slim, the second son, who came up through lower positions before taking charge of Inbursa, translated the creed into the vernacular of the shop floor for the Los Angeles Times in 1999: "We always seek to work as close to the bone as possible, and to behave as if money were scarce. It contaminates the whole company if there's waste above."
The talent was grown on the premises. Slim does not use consultants or headhunters. Eduardo Valdez joined at twenty-one and was vice chairman of Inbursa and head of its brokerage at thirty-five. José Formoso arrived at Grupo Carso at twenty, rotated through the industrial and cable television operations, and by forty was building Telmex's Central American business. They were, the Times reporter observed, men who "win no elegance contests" — tough, instinctive traders, much like their employer.
— Carlos Slim, to the Los Angeles Times, 1999When a professional, however brilliant he may be, goes from company to company, he is a mercenary. Those are people without roots.
It is worth pausing on that last phrase. The son of a fourteen-year-old who crossed an ocean alone, raised among a diaspora that defined itself by loyalty and kinship in a country that was not originally its own, built a corporate culture organized against rootlessness. The mercenary is the figure he distrusts. The executive who joined at twenty and stayed is the ideal. And above them all, the family: three sons in key roles, a son-in-law as spokesman, and now grandchildren on the boards.
The method has a harder edge. During an afternoon-long interview in 1999, Slim phoned half a dozen top executives and grilled them on specific operations, challenging their off-the-cuff financial estimates as the reporter watched. "It stimulates them to know that you are following their work," he said. He calls the reward system "quiet stimulations," recognition from bosses who know the work, "not that of looking for the spotlight."
He also encourages a specific kind of failure. "We are very, very open to small mistakes," he said in 2007. "A big mistake is very dangerous. A very big mistake is bad, but small mistakes make the people trained, and they learn how to take decisions and move ahead." His eldest son, Carlos Slim Domit, describes the same discipline from the other direction: "We always see the worst-case scenario. Instead of looking at rosy figures for the future, we look at the risk in a decision."
Where did the man learn all this? From his father, he says, and from books — though he reads them in a particular way. Showing the reporter Diego Enrique Osorno his library one day in 2015, Slim pointed out a biography of James Ling, the Texas conglomerateur. "He founded a conglomerate and wound up bankrupting it, but it is interesting to see how he did it." Then Robert Vesco, "who came into a fund and then fled to Cuba." Then Getty's memoir, which he had first read when it was serialized in Playboy. "You learn from all of them," he said, "and let me tell you, you learn from the good and the bad." The shelves of Carlos Slim contain as many cautionary tales as models. The ledger records losses too.
What the State Sold in December
Teléfonos de México had been a private company until 1973, when the government bought a majority stake from private investors. For the next seventeen years it was a state monopoly of legendary inefficiency, a company that financed itself, as Slim later recalled, by forcing customers who wanted a line to buy its stocks and bonds, and then made them wait two years for the line. In 1990 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a Harvard-trained economist dismantling the statist apparatus his own party had built, put Telmex up for sale.
The rules required Mexican majority control. Slim's account of what followed is a small masterpiece of casual specificity. There were at first four or five Mexican bidders, then three, then two; around fourteen foreign telecommunications companies were looking for Mexican partners. "We, the Mexican partners, were lucky to choose the foreign partner, because we were three and they were 12." Grupo Carso met with eight or ten of them and chose two. France Télécom, because it had taken a very old plant in France "in very poor conditions" and turned it into a highly efficient company. Southwestern Bell, because of its marketing experience and its years in mobile telephony. "We felt highly complemented," he said.
The Americans were led by Edward Whitacre, a Texan who ran Southwestern Bell and would go on to run AT&T; he would turn up at Slim's side at an awards banquet in Baltimore in 1997 and again, in February 2011, at the twentieth-anniversary celebration of the privatization, held in the gleaming new Museo Soumaya the night before it opened to the public. The friendships forged in the deal proved durable. So did the fortune.
In December 1990, the Grupo Carso consortium won control of Telmex with a bid of $1.76 billion.
The objection was immediate and has never gone away. Slim was a friend of Salinas, the critics said, and Salinas' presidency ended in the peso catastrophe of December 1994 and in scandal — his brother Raúl was later accused of amassing a fortune, much of it allegedly skimmed from those doing business with the government. To be labeled one of the "friends of Salinas" became, in Mexico, a slur. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1999 that Slim's initial 5 percent controlling share cost $442 million, "much of it borrowed from the government's financial agency at preferential rates," and that he subsequently raised more than $550 million by issuing stocks and bonds — more than covering the initial loan. Telmex, which remained a virtual monopoly until 1997, had a market capitalization of $27.8 billion by then. Slim's stake had grown to 24 percent.
"I don't doubt that he ran it well, nor do I deny that Slim is a new type of businessman in Mexico," Carlos Morera, a professor at UNAM, told the paper. "But one cannot explain the brilliance of this strategy without the support of the state."
Slim's rebuttal, preserved on his own website in the slightly unsteady English of a translation no one bothered to polish, turns on price. "Some said that and it was repeated quite insistently," he says of the claim that Salinas was effectively a partner. "I think that if someone is going to do business it is absurd to buy an over-priced company at 8.600, when he can buy it for one thousand. Do you agree?" He points out that the consortium paid in cash rather than with shares, and paid at the end of December instead of January. The rhetorical question hangs there, unanswered, and the translator's parenthetical note — this paragraph is very confusing, so not much can be done about it — sits in the published text a few lines below, an accidental confession that even the official record cannot quite make the transaction legible.
Forbes, which is not in the habit of defending billionaires' consciences, noted in 2007 that in forty years of business in Mexico, Slim "isn't known ever to have been formally investigated, indicted, convicted or otherwise sullied in regard to bribery, influence peddling or any other scandal." Both things can be true at once. A sale can be legal, even competitive, and still deliver to the winner a monopoly that no amount of operational brilliance would have produced on its own. The question was never really whether Slim cheated. It was what Mexico had sold, and for how long.
He himself regards the deal less as a coup than as an ordeal. His son calls the Telmex purchase the most difficult decision the group ever made: "We had very little time to learn about all the challenges it posed." At the anniversary in 2011, Slim credited not the regulators or the president but Francisco Hernández Juárez, the head of the telephone workers' union, who had trusted that the new owners would not respond to a bloated payroll with mass layoffs. "He believe that we were not going to make lay outs," Slim said in English, "because there were many people in the company, and we want that they will be in good conditions." The great cost-cutter, who fires headquarters on acquisition, kept the union. It was a political calculation, certainly. It was also a bet that a monopoly with labor peace would be worth more than a lean company at war.
By 2006 Telmex operated 90 percent of Mexico's telephone lines. Its wireless spin-off operated almost 80 percent of the country's cellphones. That wireless business had begun as a footnote.
Plan Gillette
Among the assets that came with Telmex was Radiomóvil Dipsa, a fledgling cellular operation, rebranded in 1990 as Telcel. Slim took an unusual personal interest in it. The arithmetic, to an engineer, was obvious. "You cannot send water by wireless, or energy, but you can send voice by wireless," he explained. A fixed network required copper running to every home; a mobile network required towers. And there was a second, more profound asymmetry. "When you're giving a land line, you are giving a land line to a house, to a home, but mobile is for a person, and there are more persons than houses."
The question was how to sell telephones to persons who, in many cases, had no bank account, no credit history, and no predictable income. Around 1994 and 1995, Telcel developed an answer its executives christened "Plan Gillette," after the old razor maker's strategy of giving away the handle to sell the blades. The company would subsidize handsets and sell service through prepaid cards — eventually under the Telcel Amigo brand — available in supermarkets and corner stores. No contract. No monthly bill. Under Mexico's calling-party-pays system, a customer could receive calls even with an empty balance.
His partners hated it. "It's not for the public," Slim told the Academy of Achievement, before telling the public anyway, "but I shall say that my partners didn't like us, and they went to meet us to say, 'We don't agree with the prepaid program. It is not profitable. You are jeopardizing — you are cannibalizing the other market,' et cetera, et cetera." The Telmex executives resisted too. The experts from the developed world saw churn, commissions, handset subsidies, and a lower-quality customer.
Slim saw something else. "It was interesting," he said, "because when you take in business average cost, you have mistakes. You need to make the analysis of everything."
— Carlos Slim, Academy of Achievement interviewThey buy cards when they need the cards and when they have the money to buy the cards. They don't need to pay a fixed rate every month, because the revenues they have are not all uniform. Sometimes they have the money, and sometimes they don't have it. Developed countries don't necessarily understand this program, no?
It is perhaps the most sympathetic sentence Slim has ever uttered about the poor, and it is also a precise description of a revenue model. Both readings are correct. The man understood the irregular economy of the informal worker, the street vendor paid in cash on good days and nothing on bad ones, better than the American and French telecom executives across the table. He built a product that let tens of millions of people own a telephone for the first time. And — in the same interview, almost in passing — he noted that "prepaid has a higher price — the prepaid minute than the postpaid." The customers who could least afford a contract paid the most per minute. The poor were not a charity case to Telcel. They were the market. "More than 90 percent of our market is prepaid in many countries of the world," he said. In Mexico, decades later, prepaid still accounted for roughly 83 percent of the mobile market, according to the country's telecommunications regulator.
In 2000, Telmex spun off its wireless operations as América Móvil, listed on the New York Stock Exchange in a $15 billion offering. The company then walked the continent like a man buying up a city block by block: Brazil's ATL and Telecom Americas, Techtel in Argentina, operations in Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru, Chile, Honduras, El Salvador. In Brazil alone, between 2002 and 2003, it spent about $5 billion to stitch five regional carriers into a new brand called Claro — and in 2006 Claro was the only one of América Móvil's twelve companies on the continent that lost money, partly because it was one of the few Slim had to build from scratch. Embratel followed in 2004, half of the cable company NET in 2005. In 2006 he paid $3.7 billion for Verizon's Latin American operations, reaching into Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In 2010 America Móvil absorbed Carso Global Telecom, the holding company for Telmex, for about $17.6 billion, part of a $21 billion consolidation that made the son the parent of the father.
Europe went less smoothly. In 2013, América Móvil's €7.2 billion bid for the Dutch carrier KPN collapsed after the Dutch economic affairs minister, Henk Kamp, warned that acquisition by a "foreign company" could have consequences for national security. The immigrant's son, who had spent a lifetime being treated as a foreigner by suspicious Mexicans, was now treated as a foreigner by suspicious Europeans. On April 23, 2014, he took control of Telekom Austria in partnership with the Austrian state — his first successful European acquisition — over the objection of labor representatives who boycotted a supervisory board meeting for twelve hours. By November 2023 he held 58 percent. In June 2024 his family's investment firm bought 3 percent of Britain's BT; by September it held 4.3 percent.
By 2022 América Móvil operated in twenty-two countries and booked $42 billion in revenue. The cell phone, the most intimate object of the new economy, had made the man without a computer the richest person on earth.
Slimlandia
On March 10, 2010, Forbes announced that Carlos Slim, with a fortune of $53.5 billion, had passed Bill Gates. It was the first time in sixteen years that the top of the list was not American and the first time ever that it belonged to someone from an emerging economy. In Mexico, the news was received with a mixture of pride and something closer to resentment. Mexicans had a word for the country they lived in, and it was not entirely affectionate: Slimlandia.
The case against him has been made many times, with varying degrees of rigor. Slim's wealth amounted to roughly 6.3 percent of Mexico's annual economic output in 2007 — the equivalent, Forbes calculated, of Gates being worth $784 billion. Half the population lived in poverty. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that Telmex charged among the highest usage fees in the world. Celso Garrido, an economist at UNAM, argued that the dominance of Slim's conglomerates prevented smaller companies from growing, which meant fewer decent jobs, which meant more Mexicans heading north. A cartoon in Reforma in 2006 showed an enormous Slim in a boxing ring, squashing a tiny opponent; the ropes were telephone lines; the caption read "Billion Dollar Baby." On a satirical television show, a newscaster shoved a pie into the mouth of a papier-mâché Slim.
Slim's response to the rate comparisons was, characteristically, a lecture in methodology. The OECD figures used purchasing-power adjustments, he complained in March 2007, which valued the peso at 7.19 to the dollar instead of the market rate of 11.15. "By purchasing power we will never be able to be compared to anyone," he said. At nominal prices, he insisted, Telmex ranked third, fifth, or eighth depending on the consumption tier. And Mexican operators paid the same for equipment as everyone else while earning far less per customer: an average revenue per user of $15, against $50 in the United States. It was an engineer's defense, technically meticulous, and it did not move public opinion one inch. Arithmetic rarely does.
Others went after the method of his dominance rather than its prices. An official at the Federal Competition Commission, speaking anonymously in 2009, said that Slim's companies "spend more on a single case than our entire annual budget." The journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio, a veteran of Mexico City's columnist wars, wrote a piece in El Universal in 2006 condemning Slim as a monopolist and said a Slim adviser subsequently threatened to pull the companies' advertising. Slim's son-in-law and spokesman, Arturo Elías Ayub, denied that any ads were removed. Riva Palacio called the episode "part of the natural dynamic between the media and the powers that be in Mexico," and added, wearily, "That's how things work here."
The political scientist Denise Dresser, who for years used her newspaper columns to argue that favorable government treatment rather than business acumen made Slim rich, was less philosophical.
— Denise Dresser, Mexican political scientist, to The New York Times, 2009Going down in history as an evil monopolist who fleeced Mexican consumers is not an image of himself that he likes, but it's a true image.
He bristles. At a lunch for foreign correspondents in the fall of 2008, a journalist pressed him on how it felt to be worth so much in a country where so many struggle; Slim cut him off. "I think it's perverse to believe that there shouldn't be strong companies in poor countries," he said. When he predicted grim times for the Mexican economy in February 2009, President Felipe Calderón delivered a barely disguised rebuke, saying that "those who have received the most from this great nation" were obligated to help. It was a remarkable sentence for a sitting president to direct at a citizen, and it contained the entire national argument in nine words. Had the nation given to Slim, or had Slim given to the nation? Which side of the ledger was he on?
The state eventually answered in the language of law. In 2011 Telcel was fined $1 billion for monopolistic practices, and the government blocked his entry into pay television. In 2013 and 2014, President Enrique Peña Nieto — whose 2012 campaign, many Mexicans noted, Slim had conspicuously declined to support — pushed through a telecommunications overhaul that imposed rate limits and infrastructure-sharing obligations on any "dominant player" holding more than 50 percent of a market. América Móvil, with 80 percent of landlines and 70 percent of mobile subscribers, was the model case. The company called the rules "confiscatory, excessive and unconstitutional," a phrase of startling bluntness in a country where tycoons and presidents usually settle things in private. Then, on July 8, 2014, it announced that it would sell off roughly 30 percent of its Mexican assets, about $20 billion worth, to escape the label.
The financial website Sentido Común, which exists largely to track Slim's holdings, called it a victory for the authorities. The Los Angeles Times added that the assets would be sold at fair-market value — "a fortune" — and that the shrewd entrepreneur "seems to have found a way not to lose too badly."
And yet, Slim has never become a hate figure in the way his critics might expect. A poll around 2011 found that many Mexicans saw him as "the great leader that Mexico needs." Jorge Castañeda, the former foreign minister, described him as "unusual among Mexican magnates. … He is generous with his time, not always with his money, but is a disarmingly accessible, discreet and good-natured tycoon." He shuffles into events alone, bodyguards well out of sight. In front of the press he can look ill at ease, like the owner of a small hardware business. "We journalists cover so many bad guys here in Mexico, so many big egos," Riva Palacio said — the same Riva Palacio whose advertising had been threatened — "that Slim, despite all his faults, doesn't appear all that bad."
In early 2024 the economist James Robinson, soon to share a Nobel Prize, was again citing Slim, as he and Daron Acemoglu had in Why Nations Fail, as a case of fortune built on a government-granted monopoly rather than innovation. The argument had become textbook material. Slim had become a chapter.
The Paper Generation
In September 2008, Slim and his family bought $128 million worth of New York Times Company shares, about 6.4 percent of the publicly traded stock. Within four months the investment had fallen to $58 million. The newspaper, meanwhile, needed money. In January 2009, bankers approached him with a proposition, and his companies Banco Inbursa and Inmobiliaria Carso lent the Times $250 million in six-year notes at 14 percent interest, with warrants convertible into stock. The terms resembled the guaranteed returns Warren Buffett had extracted from Goldman Sachs and General Electric that same panicked season. Slim received no board seat and no special voting rights; the Ochs-Sulzberger family retained control through its supervoting shares. "The New York Times needs money in the next few months," a Council on Foreign Relations analyst said, "and Slim has it." On January 20, 2015, exercising his warrants, he became the largest shareholder of the company's Class A stock. In 2017 he sold half.
The investment produced an irony that the Times itself was obliged to note. Here was a man described by its own reporters as "notoriously thin-skinned," a man whose vast advertising budget, critics said, muffled coverage at home, now underwriting the debt of the most influential newspaper in the world. When the paper profiled him in February 2009, he declined to be interviewed. At a dinner in London that December, a group of British editors expressed astonishment at the size of the Times newsroom; Slim "gave no indication whether he knew the size of the staff," a participant said. He was not buying an editorial voice. He was buying a distressed asset with a coupon, and he described it, through his spokesman, as "a business deal."
He had a theory about newspapers, and it came, like so much else, from the history books. He called himself a member of the "paper generation," and he compared the industry's predicament to that of transport companies at the turn of the twentieth century when the automobile arrived. The ones that stuck to horses went belly up. The ones that adapted survived.
It was a fitting analogy for a man who has spent his life with one foot in the stable and one in the garage. "Slim is essentially a business man of the old economy that bought a lucrative piece of the new economy," Época wrote in 2007. He does not use computers. The Observer reported that he struggles with mobile phones. His friend Alvin Toffler, the futurist author of Future Shock and The Third Wave, was among the few outsiders he credited with helping him spot opportunities early — an oracle of digital disruption advising a man who did his sums by hand. Toffler, for his part, described Slim as unusual among businessmen "who are only focused on the latest numbers," a compliment that would surely have amused the numbers-obsessed Slim.
His bets on the future have not always paid off, and he is candid about the ones that didn't. Speaking to the podcaster Oso Trava in a rare long-form interview, Slim named his worst mistake: around 1997, he bought roughly 3 percent of Apple at about $17 a share and sold at about $100. He said he had missed a similar opportunity with Amazon in 2008 and 2009. He also laid out his rules, as simple as anything in the ten principles: when uncertain, do half; diversify; keep liquidity to buy in downturns; avoid leverage. In the same conversation he called Tesla's earnings multiple irrational and expressed interest in shorting it. At eighty-five, the man who learned compound interest from a government bond was still doing the math on the most fashionable stock in the world and finding that it didn't add up.
The new economy came to him eventually in forms he could recognize. América Móvil put $40 million into the music identification app Shazam in July 2013. Grupo Carso launched Claro Música, a Latin American answer to iTunes and Spotify, in January 2015, while Sanborns controlled the 117-store Mixup chain. He backed Ora TV with Larry King. He bought stakes in soccer teams in Pachuca and León, partly for their television rights, setting up a confrontation with Televisa and TV Azteca. The pattern, in the end, was not that of a technologist. It was that of a toll collector. Whatever traveled — voice, data, music, a soccer match — he wanted to own the road.
Temporary Administrator
In 1997, at the age of fifty-seven, Slim went to the Texas Heart Institute in Houston to replace a faulty heart valve. On the operating table he suffered a massive hemorrhage. Doctors infused thirty-one bags of blood. He was, he later told Osorno, momentarily declared dead. (Some records date the surgery to 1999; Osorno, who heard the story from Slim himself, puts it in 1997, as do others. The ledger, presumably, knows.)
He survived, and the brush with death prompted him to entrust his three sons with some of his most important ventures. In 2004 Carlos Slim Domit, the eldest, took the chair of Telmex. Born in 1967, educated at Universidad Anáhuac rather than abroad — like all three brothers, a deliberate departure from the Ivy League habits of Mexico's dynastic families — Carlos Junior is the family's most visible public face: chairman of Grupo Carso, América Móvil, Telmex, and Grupo Sanborns, a motor-racing devotee who founded the Escudería Telmex team, a man who, Billboard reported in 2015, once DJ'd at a dance club in Acapulco and listens to AC/DC in his car. Marco Antonio took Inbursa. Patrick took other key roles. But as Slim recovered, Osorno noted, he retook control. "As he recovered, he increased his empire," the biographer said, "which curiously, 10 years later, in 2007, led him to be the richest man in the world."
In 1999, Soumaya Domit died. She had been, among other things, the person whose name was half the name of everything. Slim has said that theirs was a very happy marriage and that he has no intention of remarrying. In 1994 he had founded the Museo Soumaya in her honor; in March 2011 its new building opened in Plaza Carso — an asymmetrical, hexagonally tiled silver form that holds some 66,000 pieces, including the world's second-largest collection of Rodin sculptures, among them The Kiss. The President of Mexico attended the inauguration, along with Nobel laureates and writers. Admission is free. The museum exists, Slim said, to bring art to those who cannot travel. The man who has hardly spent money on himself — he has lived in the same house for some forty years — spent a fortune on bronze lovers in his wife's name.
Carlos Slim: The Power, Money, and Morality of One of the World's Richest Men, Diego Enrique Osorno's biography, is the closest anyone has come to a full portrait, and the process of writing it says as much as the result. Osorno had previously spent years investigating the Sinaloa Cartel and its leader, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, and he found the two assignments oddly similar. "The powerful usually create a cloak of silence around them which, in countries such as Mexico, is particularly difficult to pierce," he said. The book took eight years, more than a hundred interviews, and some four hundred rejections — many from people, Osorno said, "scared of upsetting the biographee." He eventually got seven hours with Slim across three meetings. "I learned you have to proceed calmly in the land of power."
Slim's philanthropy is vast, and like everything else he does, it is run on a budget. The Fundación Carlos Slim was established in 1986, in the middle of the buying spree; the Fundación Telmex in 1995. By 2011 he had put $4 billion of dividends into the former — $2 billion in 2006 and another $2 billion in 2010 — which placed him fifth on Forbes' list of the world's biggest givers. The foundation paid for 50,000 cataract surgeries in Peru for $100 million. For years Grupo Carso posted bail for first-time young offenders accused of nonviolent crimes who might otherwise wait months or years in jail for trial; about 5,000 left jail that way in 1998 alone. A program called Surgery Without Walls covered travel and supplies for volunteer doctors operating in poor villages. "Each operation costs us just $80 to $120," Slim said. Even his mercy has a unit cost.
He has been openly skeptical of the Giving Pledge, the campaign by Gates and Buffett to persuade billionaires to give away at least half their fortunes. "Poverty isn't solved with donations," he reportedly said in 2007, adding that building businesses does more for society than "going around like Santa Claus." He finds the very idea of a perpetual foundation peculiar. "I don't understand those people who want to set up a foundation that operates after they are dead, to be run by people they didn't know." The money should be administered by the living, efficiently, now.
"The truth is, you leave this world with nothing," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1999. "What you are is a temporary administrator, and you must administer well."
In June 2011, a few months after the museum opened and the government fined Telcel $1 billion, a visiting reporter found him in his office at Inbursa, under a wall of Spanish classics, financier biographies, and baseball statistics, worrying about the same question. "When I go, I will be naked," he said. "So what do I do? Do I give the companies to my children? That's a responsibility. Do I leave them 90 or 98 per cent of my wealth? Absurd. If I sell, who would buy — a foreign company? So, do I give it all away to Mexico instead?" Then he did the arithmetic in his head, the way he always does. After tax, he calculated, it would come to about $300 for every Mexican. "It's mere charity."
He has, in effect, chosen the first option, with a twist. By 2023 the third generation was moving into place: his granddaughter Vanessa Hajj Slim on the boards of América Móvil and Grupo Carso, her brother Rodrigo running Sanborns, another brother, Daniel, on the board of Minera Frisco with his cousin Diego Slim. Every week, according to people familiar with his schedule, Slim still gathers the extended family for dinner at his house in Mexico City. In December 2023, carried by the strength of the so-called super peso, his fortune passed $100 billion for the first time. By September 2026 Bloomberg put it at $123 billion — the largest in Latin America, sixteenth in the world, behind a generation of technology founders who build things he does not use.
On March 16, 2010, five days after Forbes made him the richest man on earth, Slim traveled to Jezzine, the town in the hills of southern Lebanon that his father had left at fourteen. He told the crowd that it was always in his heart. He visited the house where Khalil Salim Haddad was born and the cemetery where his family is buried, and then he had a private lunch with a cousin.
The book he took down from the shelf in his office that June was not a ledger. It was a well-thumbed copy of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran — another Maronite boy from the mountains of Lebanon who had crossed an ocean young and made his life in another language. Slim opened it to a passage he had marked and pointed to a line.
"You give but little when you give of your possessions."
Then he put it back on the shelf, a few feet from the notebook in which a seventeen-year-old had written down 200 pesos a week, and the 5,000 pesos he owed his mother.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below are drawn from five decades of Slim's practice — the crisis acquisitions, the Telmex consortium, the prepaid gamble, the headquarters-free conglomerate, and the costly collision with the Mexican state. Some are directly transferable to a founder or operator at any scale. Others, particularly those involving market dominance, are included because their costs are as instructive as their returns. Slim's own reading list includes James Ling and Robert Vesco for a reason: you learn from the good and the bad.
The Slim Playbook
- 1.Buy the panic, not the asset.
- 2.Find the cash engine before you build the empire.
- 3.Reduce every decision to one sheet of paper.
- 4.Delete the headquarters.
- 5.Practice austerity in the boom, not the bust.
- 6.Price for irregular income.
- 7.Distrust the average.
- 8.Make small mistakes deliberately — and do half when unsure.
- 9.Choose partners for the capability you lack.
- 10.Hire for roots, not résumés.
- 11.Treat dominance as a liability you are carrying.
- 12.Give while alive, and run it like an operation.
Principle 1
Buy the panic, not the asset
The Slim family fortune was built twice on the same trade, sixty-eight years apart. In 1914, Julián Slim bought his brother's share of a store and acquired downtown property at the height of the Mexican Revolution. In 1982, his son bought Reynolds Aluminio, Sanborns, Frisco, Nacobre, and dozens of other companies after Mexico's default and bank nationalization. Both men were purchasing the same underlying commodity: other people's fear. The assets were incidental. A $13 million insurer that became a $1.5 billion stake, a $50 million mining company — these were the residue of a willingness to be the only buyer when everyone else needed to be a seller.
The crucial nuance is that Slim does not buy distress for its own sake. "To buy it at a low price and in bad condition, it makes it easier," he said. "But the good thing is the potential of the company. How far it can go." The crisis lowers the price; the analysis of potential justifies the purchase. And the willingness to act is pre-committed in principle — "all times are good times for those who know how to work and have the tools to do so" — so that the decision is not made in the emotional fog of the moment.
S
Seventy Years of Counter-Cyclical Bets
The Slim family has repeatedly bought when capital fled.
1914
At the height of the Revolution, Julián Slim buys out his brother's half of La Estrella de Oriente and begins acquiring Zócalo-district property at fire-sale prices.
1982–86
After Mexico's default and bank nationalization, Grupo Carso acquires Reynolds Aluminio, Sanborns, Frisco ($50M), Seguros de México ($13M), Nacobre, and more.
1990
Grupo Carso consortium wins Telmex in the privatization for $1.76B.
2008–09
Amid the global financial crisis, Slim buys into Citigroup and lends the New York Times $250M at 14% interest.
2015
With Spain's economy still weak, Slim buys Spanish real estate and a stake in Bankia.
2023
Slim's fortune passes $100B as his companies push into Mexican oil and Spanish real estate.
Tactic: Write down, in calm times, the specific conditions under which you will deploy capital — and keep enough liquidity on hand to honor that commitment when the moment arrives.
Principle 2
Find the cash engine before you build the empire
The 1982–86 buying spree is usually told as a story of nerve. It is better understood as a story of financing. Grupo Galas was incorporated in 1980 specifically to take majority control of Cigatam, the cigarette maker, and Cigatam's steady cash — gaining an average of 1.5 points of market share a year for twenty-five years — paid for much of what followed. Without a business that generated reliable liquidity every month regardless of the macroeconomy, the crisis would have been a threat rather than an opportunity.
The pattern repeated at higher altitude. Telmex's monopoly cash flows financed América Móvil's continental expansion. The lesson is not "buy a tobacco company." It is that ambition requires an engine, and that the engine should be acquired first, before the opportunities it will fund appear. Slim's principle — "money that leaves the company evaporates; this is why we reinvest profits" — only works if there is a stream of profits to reinvest.
Tactic: Before pursuing a growth strategy, identify the one asset in your portfolio that produces predictable, crisis-resistant cash, and protect it as the foundation of everything else.
Principle 3
Reduce every decision to one sheet of paper
Slim's thesis was on linear programming, and his business method is linear programming translated into management: identify the essential variables, discard the secondary ones, optimize. "When you have a lot of variables, and you don't make a distinction between the ones that are essential and the secondary ones," he said, "you have confusion." The office without a computer and the conviction that every decision should fit on one sheet are not eccentricities. They are filters. A constraint on the format forces a discipline on the thinking.
This is the opposite of the modern instinct to accumulate data and dashboards. Slim's handwritten notebooks hold not everything, but only what matters — which is why, in 1999, he could telephone his executives one after another and catch the errors in their off-the-cuff estimates. He knew the handful of numbers that defined each business cold.
Tactic: For your next major decision, force the entire case — key numbers, worst case, and recommendation — onto a single page, and treat anything that doesn't fit as secondary until proven otherwise.
Principle 4
Delete the headquarters
On acquisition, Slim dismissed management, sold the corporate headquarters, and moved his people into offices at the production sites. For decades Grupo Carso had no corporate building; he ran the conglomerate with roughly a dozen staff. "We take down as many levels as we can," he said, "to make the highest level be near the operation." The first of the ten principles prescribes "simple organizational structures, minimal hierarchical levels" and "the advantages of a small company."
The non-obvious insight is that headquarters are not neutral overhead. They create a second organization whose interests — status, process, insulation from the factory floor — diverge from the operating business. Marco Antonio Slim's formulation is exact: "It contaminates the whole company if there's waste above." Proximity to operations is not a management style; it is an information advantage.
Tactic: Audit every layer between your senior decision-makers and the people who make or sell the product, and eliminate any layer whose primary output is reports to other layers.
Principle 5
Practice austerity in the boom, not the bust
Most companies discover frugality in a downturn and abandon it in the recovery. Slim's second principle inverts the sequence: "Maintaining austerity in good times strengthens, profits and accelerates the development of the company and averts the bitterly drastic adjustments in times of crisis." The point is partly financial — cash conserved in good years becomes buying power in bad ones — and partly cultural. Layoffs and emergency cuts, he notes elsewhere, "impact the morale of personnel."
Austerity, in this framing, is not a cost-cutting program but an option strategy. The companies that stayed lean through the 1970s were the ones able to buy the bloated ones in 1982. Austerity in the boom is what makes Principle 1 possible.
≠
Conventional Wisdom vs. the Slim Method
Where Grupo Carso's principles diverge from standard corporate practice.
| Conventional wisdom | The Slim approach |
|---|---|
| Invest in a flagship headquarters to signal strength. | Sell the headquarters; put offices at the factory. |
| Expand spending in good times; cut in bad times. | Stay austere in good times so you can buy in bad times. |
| Hire proven executives from outside. | Grow executives internally from their early twenties. |
| Price for your best, most predictable customers. | Build products for customers whose income is irregular. |
| Decide from comprehensive data. | Reduce the decision to its essential variables on one page. |
| Endow a perpetual foundation. | Give while alive, through operations you control. |
Tactic: Set your cost structure during your best quarter as if it were your worst, and bank the difference as acquisition capacity.
Principle 6
Price for irregular income
Telcel's prepaid model succeeded because Slim understood something his American and French partners did not: the customers of a developing economy do not earn on a monthly schedule. "Sometimes they have the money, and sometimes they don't have it," he said. A contract with a fixed monthly bill excludes them; a card bought at the corner store when cash is available includes them. The partners objected that it was unprofitable and would cannibalize postpaid. Prepaid now accounts for roughly 83 percent of Mexico's mobile market.
The principle extends well beyond telecom: when the payment structure doesn't match the customer's cash-flow reality, you are not facing a demand problem but a design problem. And note the commercial edge Slim admitted openly — the prepaid minute carried a higher price than the postpaid one. Matching the customer's cash flow is not only inclusive; it can command a premium for flexibility. That fact should be held alongside the ethical questions it raises, not hidden from them.
Tactic: Map when and how your target customer actually receives money, and redesign your billing to match that rhythm rather than your own accounting calendar.
Principle 7
Distrust the average
"When you take in business average cost, you have mistakes," Slim told the Academy of Achievement, explaining why his partners misjudged prepaid. "You need to make the analysis of everything." Averages blend the profitable and unprofitable segments into a single number that describes no actual customer. The prepaid user looked worse on average — more churn, more commissions — but at the margin, he paid a higher price per minute and expanded the network's reach to people who had never had a phone.
The same logic animates his rebuttal of the OECD rate comparisons, in which he argued that purchasing-power adjustments distorted the picture. Whatever one makes of that defense, the instinct is consistent: decompose the aggregate before trusting it.
Tactic: Whenever a metric is presented as an average, ask for the distribution behind it before making a decision based on it.
Principle 8
Make small mistakes deliberately — and do half when unsure
"We are very, very open to small mistakes," Slim said in 2007. "A big mistake is very dangerous." His son describes the corollary: always model the worst case, because "having understood the risk of the worst-case scenario helps us to move quickly on the mistake." Small mistakes train people to decide; big ones end companies. The design goal is a portfolio of reversible, survivable bets.
In his conversation with Oso Trava, Slim reduced the idea to a rule of almost childlike simplicity: when uncertain, do half. Diversify, keep liquidity, avoid leverage. He also volunteered his own big mistake — selling a roughly 3 percent Apple stake around $100 that he had bought near $17 — which is itself instructive. The cost of selling too early is a missed gain; the cost of overleveraging is ruin. He chose to be wrong in the survivable direction.
Tactic: Before any bet, define the worst case explicitly, and if you can't decide, commit half the capital now and reserve the rest for when you know more.
Principle 9
Choose partners for the capability you lack
In the Telmex privatization, the Mexican consortium got to choose among roughly a dozen foreign telecom companies. Slim met with eight or ten and selected two for complementary reasons: France Télécom because it had transformed a decrepit French plant into an efficient operation, Southwestern Bell for its marketing and mobile experience. "We felt highly complemented," he said. Grupo Carso brought capital, local knowledge, and Mexican majority control; the partners brought what Carso could not build quickly on its own.
The selectivity mattered as much as the selection. Slim treated the partner choice as a negotiation in which scarcity favored him — three Mexican bidders, a dozen foreign suitors — and used that leverage to pick operating expertise rather than mere capital. And when the partners later opposed prepaid, he overrode them. Complementary partners supply capability; they do not supply judgment.
Tactic: List the two or three capabilities your next major venture requires that you cannot build within a year, and choose partners solely on demonstrated excellence in those areas.
Principle 10
Hire for roots, not résumés
"When a professional, however brilliant he may be, goes from company to company, he is a mercenary," Slim said. "Those are people without roots." He doesn't use headhunters or consultants. Eduardo Valdez joined at twenty-one and was vice chairman of Inbursa at thirty-five; José Formoso joined at twenty and rotated through industrial, cable, and international telecom roles. The executives are home-grown, the motivation is "quiet stimulations" rather than public acclaim, and the boss follows the details closely enough that people know their work is seen.
The trade-off is real: internal cultures can become insular, and family dynasties raise governance questions. But the advantage is a management corps fluent in a shared operating philosophy — the ten principles function as a common language — and loyal enough to execute fast, which is precisely what crisis acquisitions require.
Tactic: Identify promising people early in their careers, rotate them across businesses to build range, and make your operating principles explicit enough that they become a shared language.
Principle 11
Treat dominance as a liability you are carrying
Telmex's 90 percent share of fixed lines and Telcel's roughly 70 to 80 percent of mobile produced the cash that made Slim the richest man in the world. They also produced the OECD reports, the Competition Commission investigations, a $1 billion fine in 2011, a blocked entry into pay television, the 2014 "dominant player" law that forced the sale of roughly 30 percent of América Móvil's Mexican assets, the collapse of the KPN bid on national-security grounds, and a permanent place in Why Nations Fail as a cautionary example. Dominance accrues political liabilities as surely as it accrues profits, and the liabilities compound.
The practical lesson for operators is not "avoid winning." It is to account for the off-balance-sheet cost of market power — regulatory risk, reputational drag, and the hostility of governments that change — as a real liability with a real maturity date. Slim's legal muscle (a regulator complained his companies spent more on one case than the agency's annual budget) bought time, not immunity.
!
The Ledger of Dominance
What market power delivered, and what it eventually cost.
| Item | Category | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Telmex fixed-line share | Asset | 90% of Mexican lines by 2006 |
| Telcel prepaid model | Asset | Roughly 83% of Mexico's mobile market is prepaid |
| OECD rate comparisons | Reputation | Telmex fees among the world's highest |
| Telcel antitrust fine | Risk | $1B for monopolistic practices, 2011 |
| KPN bid | Risk | €7.2B offer withdrawn, 2013, after Dutch security warnings |
| 2014 telecom reform | Risk | Pledge to sell ~30% of Mexican assets, about $20B |
| Telekom Austria | Redeployment | Control from 2014; stake raised to 58% by 2023 |
Tactic: Once you hold a commanding share of any market, start building a written plan for the regulatory and reputational costs of that position before a government writes one for you.
Principle 12
Give while alive, and run it like an operation
Slim's philanthropy is shaped by the same principles as his companies: operational control, low overhead, measurable unit costs. "I don't understand those people who want to set up a foundation that operates after they are dead, to be run by people they didn't know," he said. His programs are priced like products: 50,000 cataract surgeries in Peru for $100 million; operations in poor villages at $80 to $120 apiece; bail posted for about 5,000 young nonviolent offenders in a single year. His skepticism of the Giving Pledge is consistent with his view that "poverty isn't solved with donations" — that jobs and businesses do more than gifts.
Critics may reasonably argue that roughly $4 billion given by 2011 was a modest share of his fortune, and that some of the problems his foundations address are made worse by the high prices of the monopolies that fund them. Both observations deserve weight. But as a model of execution, the approach — give now, give through operations you understand, measure the cost per outcome — is a corrective to philanthropy that is ceremonial rather than effective. "What you are is a temporary administrator," he said, "and you must administer well."
Tactic: Treat any giving you do as an operating budget with a cost-per-outcome target, and deploy it in your lifetime through programs you can personally oversee.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Carlos Slim, quoted by Forbes, 2007When you live for others' opinions, you are dead. I don't want to live thinking about how I'll be remembered.
— Carlos Slim, interview in Washington, D.C., December 2, 2007I think more than the instinct, it's knowledge. Look at the numbers. Like I told you, numbers talk.
— Grupo Carso's ten principles, as summarized by Carlos SlimMoney that leaves the company evaporates; this is why we reinvest profits.
— Carlos Slim, interview in Washington, D.C., December 2, 2007We are very, very open to small mistakes. A big mistake is very dangerous. A very big mistake is bad, but small mistakes make the people trained, and they learn how to take decisions and move ahead.
— Grupo Carso's ten principles, as summarized by Carlos SlimOur premise is and has always been that we leave with nothing; that we can only do things while we are alive and that businessmen are creators of the wealth they temporarily manage.
For a fuller collection of Slim's own statements, see The World's Richest Man: Carlos Slim In His Own Words.
Maxims
- Fear is the cheapest input. The best prices appear when everyone else needs to sell and you are the only one with cash.
- Fund ambition with an engine. Acquire a steady cash generator before you go hunting for opportunities it will pay for.
- Fewer variables, better decisions. If the case doesn't fit on one sheet of paper, you haven't yet found what matters.
- Headquarters are a second company. Keep the top of the organization physically and procedurally close to the operation.
- Be frugal when you can afford not to be. Austerity in the boom is the down payment on the bust.
- Match the customer's cash flow. Design how people pay around how they actually earn.
- The average describes no one. Break aggregate numbers into their parts before you act on them.
- Make the small mistakes. Choose bets you can survive being wrong about, and do half when in doubt.
- Roots outlast résumés. Grow people inside a shared set of principles rather than renting mercenaries.
- You are the temporary administrator. Wealth is held, not owned; manage it — and give it — while you are alive.
