The success story of Carlos Slim Elu. Billionaire Carlos Slim Helu: biography, fortune Carlos Slim Helu

Carlos Slim Elu is a Mexican billionaire businessman, one of the richest people on the planet. Interestingly, it was he who, for the first time in sixteen years, managed to overtake the Americans in the global ranking of billionaires, taking a leading position. According to Forbes magazine, Carlos Slim surpassed even Bill Gates in 2010 due to the growth in the value of his companies' assets. True, not much, only 500 million dollars. However, this was enough for Carlos Slim Elu to become the richest man on the planet. His fortune is estimated at approximately 53.5 billion dollars. The personal capital of this businessman, according to some media estimates, is about 8 percent of Mexico's total GDP.

Origin of Carlos Slim

The success story of this billionaire is very informative and interesting. Carlos Slim Elu was born in Mexico City on January 28, 1940. He was the fifth child of a Lebanese refugee and the daughter of a successful Lebanese merchant. Julian Slim, his father, moved to Mexico in 1902. The fact is that the family wanted to save Julian from serving in the troops of the Ottoman Empire.

First million earned

Carlos' father had a business acumen. At the new place, he took up the real estate business. Then, in 1920, Julian bought real estate in downtown Mexico City and opened a supermarket there. This man managed to establish a successful trading business in Mexico City, in which all six of his children began to work. From them he demanded diligence, talent and devotion. In return, children received large pocket money, which they had to learn to manage from the first grade of school. Carlos had good business sense. The teenager, with the blessing of his father, began to engage in stock investment, the rules of which he mastered at the age of seventeen. It was then that Carlos Slim earned his first million.

University studies

Continuing to work successfully in this direction, he managed at the same time to study at the university at the Faculty of Civil Engineering. Carlos Slim taught algebra and linear programming in other courses in his last years. In 1961, he received a diploma, but did not begin to work in his profession.

Personal life

In 1966, Carlos married Somaya Domit Germayel. This girl was also of Lebanese origin. She was the cousin of Gemayel, the Lebanese president. The couple lived happily married for 32 years, until Somaya's death in 1999. Today, Slim is considered, despite the extra pounds, double chin and old age, an enviable groom. However, he is indifferent to beauties, and glamorous fame does not appeal to him.

Carlos' strategy

Having accumulated a decent amount of capital, he directed it to the insurance business, as well as to the purchase of hotels and Sanborns stores. Carlos Slim's focus in retail was to bring down the cost of consumer goods by making them available to the poor in Mexico. This became the basis of his business, his growing capitalization. Buy cheap, then upgrade and either sell high or join the growing family empire - this is the constant strategy of the tycoon from Mexico.

Founding of the famous holding

The country defaulted in 1982 due to the inability to pay its external debt. A large-scale economic crisis occurred in Mexico. For a few centimes, investors got rid of their solid assets accumulated. The panic situation was taken advantage of by Carlos Slim, whose biography is the topic of our article. He used the money left from his father and bought many promising companies for next to nothing. It was then that the famous investment holding Carso Group was founded. The name is made up of the first syllables of the names of Carlos and Somaya, his wife.

Expansion into various market sectors

The next step was the extraction of coal and ore. Frisco Corporation, which is still part of the Group Carso syndicate, has become a leader in the country's mining industry, as well as the chemical industry.

By the end of the 1980s, the expansion of companies owned by Carlos into various sectors of the market had reached such a scale that every second resident of the country, as well as every second enterprise, in one way or another faced daily at least one of the many structures owned by this millionaire, being consumers the goods and services they produce.

Political assets

Carlos Slim, whose fortune was already very large at that time, in addition to economic assets, also acquired political ones. Informally friendly nature are his contacts with high-ranking officials of Mexico. Among them, the most valuable was the friendship with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the president of this country in 1988-1994. Slim's detractors argue that the personal sympathies of the Mexican president allegedly played in favor of the millionaire when the question arose of the privatization of the state telecommunications company Telmex, which was at that time, and also for many years later, a monopolist in the Mexican communications market.

Acquisition of Telmex

De Gortari, who pursued a tough policy of privatizing state-owned enterprises and deregulating the economy, decided to put a number of companies up for auction, including Telmex. A group of investors led by Carlos Slim Helu won the tender. Slim paid for the block of shares he received for several years with money from the proceeds that the acquired company received. Carlos, by investing in politics, ensured his business was backed by the Mexican government for years to come.

The shocking acquisition of Telmex caused outrage in society, a storm of indignation in government circles and in the press. It led to a whole series of mass trials. The process ended in nothing, but all this time the president had to explain himself to the public and the government.

Work at Telmex

Meanwhile, Carlos Slim Helu continued to build a financial empire. His biography in these years is marked by the fact that he directed all his efforts to work in the acquired company. It took him five years to put it in order: rebuild the technical base, streamline corporate governance, and create a range of services. These efforts were not in vain - the reconstruction, carried out in five years, allowed the company in 1995 to bypass the national catastrophe that devalued the Mexican peso. Telmex, therefore, met the new development of the Mexican industry not as a decrepit company with government protection, but as the leader of the country's economy and as the main provider of telecommunications services.

Telmex enjoyed a monopoly in the Mexican market throughout the 1990s. The company even now occupies approximately 80-90 percent of the country's fixed-line communication market, as well as about 70% of the mobile one.

New companies within the holding and new cooperation

The Group Carso syndicate in 1996 was spun off into a holding called Carso Global Telecom. The main task was to coordinate the technical, organizational and financial means of the Elu group. Subsequently, this holding included the company Condumex, which produces telecommunications equipment, as well as Prodigy, the first provider in Mexico, and also a pioneer of commercial web activities.

Carlos Slim invested $1.5 billion in 1999 to control several US firms that operate cell phone centers and fiber optic networks in Puerto Rico and Florida.

On equity with SBC in February 2000, he became a co-owner of Network Access Solutions, a well-known Internet service provider. Cooperation with Microsoft made it possible to increase the number of Internet users by 3 times, which led to an increase in sales of computer equipment.

a Christmas gift

Carlos, it should be said, has always been afraid of the IT industry and computer technology. However, everything changed at Christmas, when Carlos Slim Elu received a modern laptop as a gift from his sons. Home made the right choice. Perhaps it was this laptop that changed Slim's attitude towards the telecommunications segment, which was the reason for working in this particular direction.

The conquest of the Latin American market

Carlos eventually began to look for opportunities to expand the business outside of his country. He sought to conquer the Latin American market. To do this, Slim began to buy up regional telecom operators. In 2000, he acquired a number of telephone operators that went bankrupt due to the financial crisis, which provided the millionaire with a dominant position in the telecommunications market throughout Latin America.

Carlos Slim today

The mirror of Mexican evolution is Carlos Slim Helu. This is an entrepreneur who uses connections in the state apparatus, while far from the ideals of free competition and an open market. On the other hand, this is, of course, a talented person who is aimed not only at acquisitiveness, but also at creation. Telmex, after all, not only collected all the profits and benefits of the monopolist. Under Slim's leadership, in the first ten years, the firm modernized networks and quadrupled the number of subscribers. From the late 1990s and over the next ten years, 30 million low-income Mexicans gained access to mobile phones.

Surely, most researchers of the concept of “success”, lovers of studying the biographies of successful people, have heard the name Carlos Slim Helu. Yes, and billions of average inhabitants know him. And how not to know one of the richest people in the world? In 2010, the well-known Forbes magazine recognized him as the richest in the world!

Of course, most are wondering: “Why? Why did he succeed?"

It is very easy to find information in a search engine for the query “Carlos Slim Elu biography” information, many sites describe in detail many facts from his life and systematize the points thanks to which he was able to achieve incredible achievements.

But still, a lot of this person’s life remains a mystery because of his lifestyle. Carlos was never interested in a glamorous social life and "window dressing" in public, moreover, he constantly tried to lead a life without prying eyes. That is why it is so difficult to find a photo with fragments of his personal life on a search engine request “Carlos Slim Elu photo”. On the basis of his biographical facts, many theories and assumptions can be built, in any case, it is difficult to call Carlos an ordinary person.

Judge for yourself: he grew up in the family of entrepreneur Julian Slim, who earlier, being a refugee from Lebanon, was able to organize his very successful business in Mexico. As the father of six children, he raised them completely outside the box, because he attracted his sons to work in business and paid them not children's pocket money, not to mention moralizing and attitude towards life. Having an ever-growing amount of money in his hands from an early age, Carlos learned to manage it at the level of a professional investor.

You can immediately see with the naked eye that the guy had a non-standard way of thinking and understanding of life thanks to his father. At the age of 12, he began investing in stocks, and at 18, Carlos Slim Helu earned a whole million and became a dollar millionaire.

It is impossible not to note his abilities. When the future billionaire studied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the university, he managed not only to learn science excellently and at the same time successfully engage in investing, but also, being in his senior years, to teach the subject being studied to parallel flows!

Carlos Slim Elu's wife

The wife of Carlos Somaia Domit Germayel is also hard to call an ordinary girl, since she was none other than the cousin of the President of Lebanon!

They lived together for 32 years, and after her death in 1999, Carlos did not want to marry a second time, being one of the most enviable suitors, not only in Mexico, but all over the world!

You can talk about the path of Carlos's formation for a very long time, since in his biography there are a lot of ambiguous points in resolving issues. One of the main factors of brilliant success is friendship, in fact, with all high-ranking government officials in Mexico. There were many high-profile scandals and discussions of such a close friendship, especially during the privatization of the well-known Mexican company Telmex, then a scandal broke out about the behind-the-scenes friendship of the billionaire with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. He, in turn, pursued a policy of mass privatization with a course of economic deregulation. As practice later showed, Carlos Slim Elu, thanks to such a bargain, was able to monopolize the telecommunications market in Mexico, buying out all the local telephone companies in parallel. But the hype did not change anything, and the billionaire secured his position for decades. Already in 1995, at a time when financial disaster swept the entire state, his company Telmex took a leading position in the state economy and was the leading provider of telecommunications services in Mexico.

Her net income is $1 million a year. But Telmex is far from the only company Carlos has made his fortune from. He started in the insurance business, then acquired the Sanborns chain of hotels and stores. Moreover, due to the depreciation of a large number of companies during crises, Slim Elu bought them almost in bundles, for mere pennies, and then increased his profits thanks to the growth of shares in them. He united his entire empire into a holding company called "Group Carso". The next step was the mining industry and the purchase of Frisco, which Carlos then brought to the leaders among the country's mining companies. In fact, every day by the end of the 80s, every second inhabitant of Mexico or every second enterprise had to deal with the structures of Group Carso.

And only in 1990, the billionaire acquired Telmex. In the second half of the 90s, the Carso Group was merged into the Carso Global Telecom holding. At the same time, investments in fiber-optic technologies began, and this is over one and a half billion dollars! Telecommunications equipment, web activities, co-ownership of Network Access Solutions with Microsoft - in general, despite his old fashionedness, Carlos actively developed along with IT technologies. But his powerful advancement in this area did not end there. In 2000, he took advantage of the crisis and bought on the cheap a number of telecommunications companies in the Latin American market, thereby going beyond Mexico, the list included the Latin American branch of such a well-known company as AT&T. Ultimately, he took a dominant position in Latin America in the telecommunications market.

Is Carlos Slim Elu an ordinary person?

What is most interesting, the billionaire does not like luxury and constantly teaches his employees the rational use of finances. As an example, Carlos Slim Elu prefers the simple, unobtrusive style that his family has lived in for decades.

Recently, the billionaire began to actively engage in charitable activities, in the accounts of his funds about 4 billion dollars.

We can say with confidence that it is still hard to call an ordinary person like Carlos Slim Elu. The success story of this person is simply amazing, but at the same time it is covered with a number of moral, ethical and moral issues, as an example, with Telmex, rotation in oligarchic clans, monopoly and government support, etc. Not everyone can live like this and climb the podium of fame, and not everyone needs such a path. In any case, he skillfully knows how to use his capital and has acquired very influential acquaintances and is currently aiming to create his own family dynasty, for example, the Rodschilds or the Morgans.

Copying him completely as a person and acting like Carlos Slim, hoping to achieve similar results, hardly makes sense. And there is something for those who like to study biographies to learn skills and abilities.

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Elu has achieved the almost impossible - he pushed the Americans from the top rungs of the ranking of the richest people in the world. Experts have calculated that the personal fortune of Carlos Slim is 8% of the gross product of the Mexican economy.

The famous Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Elu has been holding the honorary title of the richest man in the world for several years. This billionaire was able to take this place, while beating the Americans, and yet no one has done this for 16 years.

Forbes magazine research suggests that Carlos Slim Elu in 2010 surpassed Bill Gates himself in terms of the value of his own business assets. By the way, the difference was small, only half a billion dollars, but this was enough to get the status of the richest person on Earth.

If unofficial data that the personal capital of Carlos Slim Elu is about eight percent of the size of the gross domestic product of Mexico. The numbers are impressive, and you can't argue with that.

The life story of Carlos Slim has long been mystical in his homeland. Almost all Mexicans have at least once heard the fairy tale that the poor son of a Libyan immigrant could become a powerful autocrat, who currently possesses simply countless treasures. However, in reality, things were not always so rosy and cloudless.

Carlos Slim Elu was born on January 28, 1940. His father had once immigrated from Libya, and his mother was the daughter of a prosperous Libyan merchant who resignedly followed her husband. In such a simple way, Julian Slim, Carlos's father, wanted to escape from service in the ranks of the Ottoman army. The family arrived in Mexico in 1902.

Julian had good business acumen, and therefore, having arrived at a new place, he decided to open a real estate business. After working until 1920, Carlos's father bought a building located in downtown Mexico City and opened a supermarket in it. Julian's trading business developed successfully.

Gradually, he involved all six children in the business, and constantly demanded talent, diligence and devotion from them. For their work, the children received good pocket money, and therefore learned to manage with special diligence. Business flair Carlos manifested itself literally in the first grade. The teenager was fond of stock investment, and having fully mastered all the rules of this work, he managed to make his first million at the age of seventeen.

Without giving up investing and working in this direction, Karlom successfully studied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. As a final year student, he began teaching algebra, as well as a relatively new science - linear programming. In 1961, Carlos Slim Elu received a diploma, but did not want to work in his specialty.

Considerable capital, which he managed to accumulate, Carlos decided to invest in the development of the insurance business. In addition, he bought a chain of hotels and shops Sanborns, and made the cost of goods and services affordable for ordinary Mexicans with an average income level. The capitalization of his business constantly increased due to the fact that he used his indispensable strategy - to buy cheaply, update or improve, and then sell at a higher price.

In 1982, Mexico was unable to pay its external debt, and therefore officially declared default. This, of course, led to a large-scale economic crisis, in which investors tried to get rid of solid assets for a penny. This panic situation took advantage of Carlos Slim, and during the crisis he was able to buy many promising companies. That is how the investment holding Carso Group ended up in his hands.

He then moved on to ore and coal mining, an activity that soon became part of the diversified syndicate of the Carso Group. Over time, Carlos was able to make his Frisco company a leader in the national mining industry, and open up another promising industry - the chemical industry.

By the late 1980s, the number of companies in the Carso Group syndicate had grown so much that almost one in two Mexicans regularly encountered them every day in one way or another.

Carlos Slim was able to acquire not only economic, but also political assets. The sound management of these assets was made possible by his extensive knowledge. He established close contacts with many high-ranking officials and representatives of the Mexican authorities. Especially valuable was his friendship with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Detractors say that Slim used his connections with officials for his own gain, in particular, during the privatization of the Telmex telephone company. The details of the cooperation between the president and the entrepreneur were known only to them, but throughout the entire presidential term, these relations caused a storm of indignation.

Such a blow to reputation did not upset Carlos Slim Elu too much, and the construction of his financial empire continued. For five years, he carried out organizational measures that made it possible to streamline the work of the empire. No crisis could break this colossus, which guaranteed 10 billion in annual turnover and about a billion in net profit.

In the nineties, Slim's company gained a monopoly in the telephone market. Soon the sphere of providing Internet services was also developed. Despite the fact that computer technology has always been alien to Carlos Slim, he was able to understand computers and found this area very promising.

The entrepreneur is constantly worried about expanding his business outside of Mexico. Thanks to his skillful work, his company now dominates the telecommunications market in all of Latin America.

Analyzing the success story of Carlos Slim Elu, we can highlight several secrets of the popularity of this man. He was not the heir of millions, but he always had a stable income. His current status is a personal merit, which for the most part was based on business acumen, hard work and entrepreneurial talent. This man is known for his frugality and modest lifestyle.

The site reviewer studied the biography of Mexican entrepreneur Carlos Slim Elu, who built the country's largest conglomerate Grupo Carso and from 2010 to 2013 remained at the top of the Forbes world ranking. The entrepreneur is criticized for establishing a monopoly and using connections in the government of the country.

The biography of the richest man in Mexico, Carlos Slim Elu, at first glance looks like a typical success story. The son of a Lebanese immigrant, he started early in the family business and later invested in various companies. Gradually, Carlos built his own empire and raised a fortune of $ 50 billion.

Along with fame, the entrepreneur received accusations of monopoly and the use of state structures to strengthen his position. Some analysts call Mexico "Slimland": while in the country, it is impossible not to encounter the products or services of Carlos Slim's companies.

Carlos Slim Elu

The Early Years of Carlos Slim Elu

The father of entrepreneur Julian Slim Haddad was born into a poor Lebanese family. At the age of 14, he left the country to avoid serving in the Turkish army. Four of his brothers were already living in Mexico. In 1911, Julian, together with his brother José, created the haberdashery store La Estrella de Oriente. The initial capital amounted to about 25 thousand pesos, the co-founders invested in it equally.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari, President of Mexico 1988-1994

Slim invested $440 million in the deal and received 20% of Telmex. A year later, it turned out that the real value of the company was $ 12 billion. In addition, the other two shareholders were foreign organizations, and Telmex was effectively in the hands of Slim.

July 31, 2015, 23:13

Carlos Slim Elu expressed the opinion that people should work only three days a week, devoting 10-11 hours a day to work. Four weekends people should spend with their families, take care of their health and education. At the same time, 75-year-old Carlos Slim is sure that now people are retiring too early. We must allow them to work fully until the age of 70, and those who feel the strength in themselves - even longer. Three days - to work, four - to rest and do other things.

Carlos Slim Elu was born on January 28, 1940 in Mexico City. He was the fifth child in a Lebanese Catholic family. His father, Julian Slim, came to Mexico in 1902 to escape mandatory conscription into the Ottoman army.

Of all the children, Carlos was the smartest, most talented and diligent. In addition, the boy had the ability to do mathematics, which helped him to start investing. Carlos made his first "adult" investments at the age of 12, acquiring shares in a Mexican bank. And the first million Carlos Slim Elu earned when the young man was only 17 years old.

Success in business did not blind either Carlos or his father. The young man entered the National University of Mexico, where he studied construction, while continuing to play on the stock exchange. In his senior years, Carlos taught algebra and programming to students from other courses.

At the age of 25, Carlos left the walls of the university with a degree in civil engineering, but he never began to work in his specialty. By that time, young Slim was already the owner of quite significant capital, part of which he invested in the purchase of hotels, the insurance business and trade. In the latest industry, Slim had an idea. It consisted in the fact that in his stores the prices of goods were affordable for ordinary Mexicans.

In the crisis of the 80s, Carlos Slim turns his attention to the mining industry. As a result, he becomes the owner of Frisco Corporation - the leader of the national mining and chemical industries.

Slim's influence on the Mexican economy becomes such that every Mexican is exposed to his companies or products. At this time, Slim begins to climb to the heights of the political Olympus. True, Slim does not go directly into politics, preferring to establish and maintain good relations with the authorities.

Carlos Slim continued to explore the promising telecommunications market. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Slim becomes the owner of a 30 percent stake in America Movil, a Latin American consortium of cellular operators. In 2008, he acquires stakes in The New York Times and Citibank. In 2002, he purchased the liabilities of the bankrupt WorldCom at a bargain price and became the largest shareholder of MCI formed in its place.

Personal life and family

In 1966, Carlos Slim married a girl named Somaya Domit Germayel, who was also of Lebanese origin and was a cousin of former Lebanese President Gemayel.

He lived happily with her for 32 years until her death in 1999.

Museum named after his late wife

Carlos Slim continues to be seriously called Mexico's "most desirable widower" by glamor magazines. However, he is not attracted by glamorous fame, and he is indifferent to young beauties.
The Slim family has a number of well-established traditions, one of which is the collective vacation on the west coast of Mexico. In the summer, all family members, including grandchildren, get together to spend a few weeks somewhere on the beach of the Gulf of California.

Love for the family hearth was instilled in him and his brothers from early childhood. Father and mother taught them to enjoy life and realize the responsibility of each to the family. The issue of responsibility has always been at the core of the Slim family philosophy. It was this feeling that helped Carlos Slim become the richest man in the world. In the next 25 years, the wealthy and influential Slim family could be an extremely positive factor in the development of Latin America.

Carlos has 6 children, three sons and three daughters.

The eldest son Carlos Slim Domit (born 1967) is the chairman of the holding company Grupo Carso.