Carlos Slim: biography, family, net worth, success story. Biography of Carlos Slim Helu The richest Mexican in the world

Carlos Slim Helu is one of the richest, most successful and wealthy people in the world. In 2014, he took second place in the ranking, and previously for many years he was its leader. In Carlos' homeland, Mexico, there is a popular legend about how he, being the son of a poor immigrant, was somehow able to magically achieve immeasurable wealth.

In fact, his success story is not so rosy. To become what he is now, Carlos had to study a lot, fall and get up again many times.

Childhood and first income

Carlos Slim Elu was born in 1940 to Libyan parents. His mother was the daughter of a successful merchant, and she had every chance to take her place in the sun in this life. However, fate brought her together with a poor man who dreamed of escaping his native country so as not to serve in the army. Together they immigrated to Mexico. The family had five children, and Carlos was the penultimate of them.

In Mexico, Carlos' father went into the real estate business. The business was successful, however, after a while he decided to change his field of activity and opened a trading company. All the children in the family, including Carlos, gladly helped their father in business, although he was quite strict with them - he demanded discipline, diligence and dedication.

Carlos and his brothers always tried to earn some extra money based on their abilities, and their father taught them to monitor their financial condition. Everyone had a special notebook where all personal income and expenses were recorded. And then the father helped each child analyze their financial situation and understand whether their small business was profitable.

Surprisingly, as a teenager, Carlos began to be interested in stock investing, and thanks to his talent in this area, at the age of 17 he earned his first million.

After graduating from college with a degree in civil engineering, Carlos worked for some time as a teacher of algebra and linear programming. However, he had no plans to work purely in his specialty in the future.

The beginning of a great journey

Both while studying at the institute and while teaching, Carlos did not stop engaging in stock investing. You could say that this was his golden key to the doors labeled “success.” Having accumulated a significant amount, he acquired the Sanborns chain of stores and hotels. His goal was to improve the quality of goods sold and services provided, but not to make them prohibitively expensive. It must be said that he used this strategy in the future - he purchased a cheap product, made it better, and sold it at a higher price.

In 1982, an economic crisis began in Mexico. Most businessmen sought to sell their companies for insignificant amounts, so as not to go bankrupt in the future. But Carlos Slim did not act like everyone else. On the contrary, he tried to buy up all the companies put up for sale that seemed promising to him. Based on the acquired companies, he created the investment group Carso Group.

Further, ore and coal mining appeared in Carlos Slim's field of activity. He was able to bring one of the Frisco companies acquired during the crisis to a leading position among the entire mining and chemical industry.

The Carso Group holding continued to grow, and already at the end of the 1980s the number of companies in it was so high that almost every second resident of Mexico daily used one or another of the services that Carlos Slim provided to the people.

Policy

Carlos Slim was able to become a specialist in the political sphere. Managing many political assets was easy for him thanks to his knowledge in this area and broad outlook. Serious officials and high-ranking representatives of the Mexican government appeared in his social circle. Many argued that Carlos established political connections only for his own benefit.

For example, when the telephone company Telmex, always in the hands of the state, became its property, the media unleashed a storm of accusations and claims on Slim. Although this slightly tarnished Carlos's reputation, his business empire did not suffer much. The stable business continued to bring in huge amounts of money, and no crises were an obstacle to this.

Business expansion

In the 1990s, Carlos Slim became a monopolist in the telephone services market and began providing Internet access services to the Mexican population.

Since the 2000s, while continuing to conduct business, Slim began to expand beyond Mexico. He became the owner of telecommunications companies in Argentina, Honduras, Colombia, and Brazil.

Family

Despite being extremely busy in business, family has always been first in Carlos’s personal list of priorities. Having lived in a happy marriage with his wife, Slim became a widower in 1999. All six of Carlos' children are actively involved in his business. The eldest son is now the chief executive of the Carso Group. Money is far from the most important thing that Carlos Slim Helu was able to provide for his children. Father's love, respect and concern for the future of his children turned out to be much more valuable.

Quotes by Carlos Slim Helu

• You should not indulge in excesses, even when you can afford it. When times get tough, you'll know you did the right thing by not allowing yourself to spend even an extra $100.
• In business, it is worth sharing its fruits, but not the trees that bear these fruits.
• I make all my decisions quickly. This is one of the main secrets of success.
• Wealth should bring more wealth. This is why I invest.
• I don't care what other people think of me. The worst thing that can happen in a person's life is to constantly worry about what his reputation is. I don’t want to live out my last years, tormented by thoughts of what the public will think and say about me.
• I love doing charity work. But if the country is in deep poverty, charity alone cannot help. To bring people above the poverty line, first of all, it is necessary to create stable jobs.
• Don't look at others, act your own way. When the crisis began and everyone was selling their assets, I bought them. Perhaps someone then considered me a fool, but where are they now, and where am I?
• You need to be proud of yourself when you have already achieved something. When you have just started doing something, this is not a reason to be proud. Show me the result.
• Whatever team you create, always make sure that there are no pessimists in it. They are the killers of all ideas, proposals and initiatives. All my life I have been sick with optimism, and this is the only thing that did not allow me to drown in a sea of ​​failures.

Surely, most researchers of the concept of “success”, those who like to study the biographies of successful people, have heard the name Carlos Slim Helu. And billions of average people know him. How can you not 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 people ask: “Why? Why did he succeed?”

It is very easy to find information in a search engine for the query “Carlos Slim Elu biography”; 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, much of this man’s life remains a mystery due to his lifestyle. Carlos was never interested in a glamorous social life and “showing off” in public; moreover, he constantly tried to lead a life without prying eyes. This is why it is so difficult to find a photo with fragments of his personal life when searching the search engine “Carlos Slim Elu photo”. Based on his biographical facts, one can build many theories and assumptions; in any case, Carlos can hardly be called an ordinary person.

Judge for yourself: he grew up in the family of entrepreneur Julian Slim, who previously, as a refugee from Lebanon, was able to organize his own very successful business in Mexico. Being the father of six children, he raised them in a completely unconventional way, since he involved his sons in business work and paid them not children's pocket money, not to mention morals and an attitude towards life. Having an ever-growing amount of money in his hands from an early age, Carlos learned how to manage it level of a professional investor.

It is immediately obvious to the naked eye that the guy had unconventional 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 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 master science perfectly and at the same time successfully engage in investing, but also, while in his senior year, teach the subject he was studying in parallel streams!

Carlos Slim's wife Helu

Carlos's wife Somaya Domit Germayel is also hard to call an ordinary girl, since she was none other than the cousin of the Lebanese President!

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 eligible bachelors, not just in Mexico, but in the whole world!

We can talk about the path of Carlos’s development for a very long time, since in his biography there are many ambiguous moments in resolving issues. One of the main factors for brilliant success is friendship, in fact, with all high-ranking government officials in Mexico. There were many high-profile scandals and discussions about such a close friendship, especially during the privatization of the famous Mexican company Telmex, then a scandal broke out about the billionaire’s behind-the-scenes friendship 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 Helu, thanks to such a profitable purchase, 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 consolidated his position for decades. Already in 1995, at a time when financial disaster engulfed 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 made his fortune from. He started in the insurance business, then acquired the Sanborns chain of hotels and stores. Moreover, thanks to the depreciation of a large number of companies during crises, Slim Elu bought them almost in batches, for mere pennies, and then increased his profits thanks to the growth of their shares. He united his entire empire into a holding company called "Group Carso". The next step was the mining industry and the purchase of the Frisco company, which Carlos later made a leader among the country's mining companies. In fact, every day by the end of the 80s, every second person in Mexico or every second enterprise had to deal with the structures of Group Carso.

And only in 1990, the billionaire acquired the Telmex company. In the second half of the 90s, Group Carso was merged into the Carso Global Telecom holding. At the same time, investments began in fiber optic technologies, and this is over one and a half billion dollars! Telecommunications equipment, web activities, co-ownership of Network Access Solutions together 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 up a number of telecommunications companies on the Latin American market on the cheap, thereby expanding beyond Mexico to include the Latin American branch of such a well-known company as AT&T. Ultimately, it came to dominate the Latin American telecommunications services market.

Carlos Slim Is Helu an ordinary person?

What’s most interesting is that the billionaire does not like luxury and constantly teaches his employees how to use finances rationally. As an example, Carlos Slim Helu prefers a house in a simple, unobtrusive style, in which his family has lived for several decades.

Recently, the billionaire began to actively conduct charitable activities; his funds have about 4 billion dollars in his funds.

We can say with confidence that it’s still hard to call someone like Carlos Slim Helu an ordinary person. The success story of this man is simply amazing, but at the same time it is covered with a number of moral, ethical and ethical issues, for example, with Telmex, rotation in oligarchic clans, monopoly and government support, etc. Not everyone can live like this and ascend to the pedestal of fame, and far Not everyone needs this 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 Morgans.

Copying him completely as a person and acting like Carlos Slim, hoping to achieve similar results, hardly makes sense. And lovers of studying biographies have plenty to learn from.

Daria Nikitina

Reading time: 4 minutes

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The son of a Lebanese immigrant who moved to Mexico in 1902, billionaire Carlos Slim Helu is today the richest man in the world. It is noteworthy that the list of the richest people on the planet is headed by Carlos Slim Helu for the second year in a row, during which the billionaire increased his fortune by another $20.5 billion. At the moment The telecommunications tycoon's capital is estimated at $74 billion.

The success story of Carlos Slim Helu

The success story of Carlos Slim Helu is very interesting and educational. The future billionaire was born on January 28, 1940 in Mexico City. The foundation of Carlos Slim Helu's capital was laid by his father. He created a real estate company that generated good income, and a little later, in 1920, he acquired real estate in the business district of Mexico City, which became the foundation for the well-being of the Slim family.

But still, Carlos Slim did not become the heir to a million-dollar fortune, although he had a good stable income. So, without any exaggeration, his current status as a billionaire can be called a personal achievement based on hard work, business acumen and, undoubtedly, entrepreneurial talent.

Carlos Slim started his business activity with a retail chain, relying on moderate prices for the far from wealthy population of Mexico. And it justified itself. The next step was the mining of coal and ore, and today the Frisco Corporation, owned by Carlos Al, is one of the leaders in the national mining and chemical industries.

It should be noted that in the process of developing his business, Carlos Helu established extensive political connections, thanks to which he later became the actual owner of the telecommunications market in Mexico. Carlos Slim's vision of the future, as well as a thoughtful and timely response to the development of advanced technologies, strengthened the financial position of Carlos Slim, and today he owns the leading national mobile operators.

In addition, Carlos Slim is one of the key figures in the Internet provider market in Latin America. It is impossible not to mention Carlos Slim Helu as a philanthropist. There is about $4 billion in the accounts of the charitable institutions he created. And another $6 billion is planned to flow in the coming years. In addition, the entrepreneur has invested $500 million in the social sphere and education of Mexico. That's less than what you spend on charity

Carlos Slim Helu Together with Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, he is one of the three richest people in the world. At the same time, Slim has recently shown the fastest growth rates.

According to Forbes, in 2010 he has the first largest fortune. The richest man in Latin America. Financial status is based on the communications industry, Teléfonos de México, Altria Group (formerly director of Philip Morris), Telcel and América Móvil. The entrepreneur's main asset is the holding company Grupo Carso, which controls a number of large Mexican companies.

The Mexican businessman is worth more than $67.8 billion, equal to 8% of Mexico's gross domestic product. The site estimated Gates' fortune at $59.2 billion. 70-year-old Slim managed to dislodge Gates from the first position in the ranking thanks to a 27% increase in the price of America Moville shares from March to June 2007 - the Mexican tycoon owns 33% of the shares of this largest cellular operator in the Latin American region.

Carlos Slim became the first Mexican in the history of the rating to rise to the top of the billionaire pyramid. Also, for the first time in 16 years, a non-US citizen did so. His fortune is estimated by experts at 53.5 billion dollars. Over the year it increased by 18.5 billion.

Companies controlled by him - virtual monopolists in the telecommunications sector of Mexico And.

Patrick, the youngest son of Carlos Slim Helu remembers well that his father was not always a super wealthy man. This dates back to the 1980s, when Mexico was in deep financial crisis. Carlos periodically gathered his three teenage sons for economics classes. As a rule, everyone sat at home in the living room around the head of the family. The lessons were practical, looking at examples of how Mexican insurance companies were more successful than American ones, or, conversely, how Mexican industrial manufacturers were inferior to their European competitors. For Mr. Slim, who once taught mathematics, these classes meant much more than just academic lessons. He wanted to teach his sons what he had learned from his father, the Lebanese emigrant Julian Slim, who came to Mexico in 1902 to avoid conscription into the regular army of the Ottoman Empire. Founding his own real estate business in Mexico City, Slim the Elder, after the Mexican Revolution of 1920, purchased real estate in the business part of the city and opened a supermarket.

Julian Slim liked to say that, no matter what, one cannot discount such a large country as Mexico. Carlos Slim invested heavily in the family business. He inherited his outstanding ability to calculate a situation from his father. Initially, after spending $55 million to develop his own insurance company, Carlos made substantial investments in the Sanborns retail chain and hotel business. These investments became the basis Slim's huge business empire, which today is worth $150 billion. The income of the family business of the Mexican billionaire Slim in 2006 amounted to 5% of Mexico's gross domestic product. Obese and constantly smoking a cigar, Carlos Slim can be compared to the famous American financier John Morgan. But given the presence of his interests in various spheres of the world economy, he looks more like billionaire Rockefeller(John D.Rockefeller), who has succeeded in doing business in an internationally competitive environment.

Mister Slim is known for his frugality . During business meetings, he ostentatiously wears an old, cheap watch with a built-in calculator. Several years ago, he wrote the so-called corporate code for employees of the manufacturing conglomerate Grupo Carso. One of his rules is: “Avoid excess even in the easiest times of your life, for this will provide you with stability during the greatest difficulties.” The average Mexican is constantly confronted with individual components of Mr. Slim's business empire, for example, the Telefonos de Mexico (TelMex) corporation controls 92% of the national wireline telecommunications network. And his company America Movil controls 70% of assets in the mobile communications segment in Mexico.

George W. Grayson, an American professor of government, calls Mexico Slimland, trying to show how deeply rooted the Slim family business is in the daily life of this country. Many Mexican citizens hoped that the start of the privatization process in the 1990s would create a competitive environment and sharply lower prices. However, according to Professor Grayson, Carlos Slim is one of those "fat cats" who are holding back the development of the Mexican economy, leading monopolies or oligopolies. The professor believes that Mexico's national economy is very efficient, but because of monopolists like Slim, the ability to compete in the country is reduced to zero. In the early 1960s, Carlos, having graduated from the Faculty of Engineering of the National University of Mexico, became a metropolitan stockbroker and began acquiring industrial companies on the stock exchange. Over time, he formed his own financial holding company, Grupo Carso. In 1982, Mexico experienced an economic crisis. The country was declared in default due to non-payment of external debt.

Investors left Mexico City, and Carlos Slim got the opportunity buy companies for next to nothing. Gradually, the Mexican economy recovered, and by the end of the 1980s, Slim became one of the country's most successful businessmen. When the Mexican government put the state-owned telecommunications company Telefonos de Mexico up for sale, Carlos Slim made every effort to become a co-owner. Together with the American corporation SBC (now AT&T) and the French France Telecom, Mr. Slim acquired a 20% stake in Telefonos de Mexico for $2 billion. In addition, Slim and the company received a monopoly right to manage government telecommunications for 7 years.

Another component of Carlos Slim's success was the sponsorship of the PRI political party led by former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The famous Latin American publicist Andres Oppenheimer, in his book on Mexican politics, “Curbing Chaos,” describes a party that took place in 1993, at which Salinas representatives turned to 30 influential businessmen in the country for help. Among them was Carlos Slim, who invited everyone present to help the pro-presidential party privately, so as not to provoke a public scandal. According to unverified data, each businessman donated an average of about $25 million. By investing in politics, Carlos Slim ensured his business long-term support of the Mexican government. Thanks to this, Slim's financial empire virtually monopolized the country's telecommunications industry for more than 15 years. Over time, Mr. Slim began to look for ways to expand his business beyond Mexico. As Randall Stephenson, an AT&T executive who worked in Mexico from 1992 to 1996, recalls, Carlos Slim constantly nurtured the idea of ​​​​conquering the Latin American mobile telecommunications market, so he began buying up regional cellular operators. In 2000, he skillfully took advantage of the financial crisis in the Internet company market to acquire a number of bankrupt regional telephone operators, including the Latin American branch of AT&T. This ultimately gave it a dominant position in the provision of telecommunications services in Latin America. Despite the fact that Carlos Slim conducts his affairs through numerous commercial companies, the overall control of the business is exercised by a group of his close and trusted persons. Having undergone heart surgery in 1997, 67-year-old Carlos Slim Helu is gradually retiring and transferring the initiative to his sons, who form the backbone of the Slim family business.

Come to the fore his three sons- Carlos Jr., Marco Antonio and Patrick, who are actively involved in the development of various areas of the family business. Although Carlos Slim Helu has not yet officially named his successor, at the moment his eldest son, also Carlos Slim, is actually the second person in the Slim family hierarchy. It is he who heads the financial conglomerate Grupo Carso and, according to close friends, has the most pronounced charisma among the three brothers. It should be noted that the sons of Carlos Slim Sr. are not like the children of other famous oligarchs. They did not go to Europe to graduate from some elite special school there and receive a foreign diploma. The Slim brothers studied economics in their home country of Mexico City and gained hands-on experience in the family business.

Carlos Jr., starting at the age of 14, worked in his father's banking institutions. At one time, he was engaged in the development of the Sanborns shopping center in downtown Mexico City, which later became the most prestigious store in the capital selling books and musical products. In 1998, Carlos Jr. headed the financial holding Grupo Carso. If Carlos Jr. became the main specialist in the field of service and work with corporate clients, then Marco Antonio positions himself only as a financier. His business career began in 1992 with the Inbursa financial group, part of Grupo Carso. Becoming at the age of 24 years at the head of this financial institution, Marco Antonio leads it to this day. Patrick, the youngest son of Carlos Slim Elu, began working for his father's America Movil after attending university. Since 2004, when he was elected chairman of the board, the value of the company's shares has tripled. Thus, under Patrick's leadership, America Movil became the most profitable component of Carlos Slim's business empire.

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 Mr. Slim's little grandchildren, get together to spend a few weeks somewhere on the beach of the Gulf of California. According to Carlos Jr., 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 the basis of the Slim family philosophy.

On accounts charities created by Mr. Slim is about $4 billion. Over the next few years, another $6 billion will flow into these accounts. Carlos Slim invested $500 million in the development of education and social services in Mexico. He is one of the main sponsors of Nicholas Negroponte's "Laptop for Every Child" program. Mr. Slim recently transferred about $100 million to the Bill Clinton Foundation, which fights poverty in Latin America. In addition, he made significant investments in the restoration of the historical part of Mexico City. Carlos Slim Helu has his own view on the problem of providing social assistance. The Slim family is trying to invest more in the development of the national economy than in social subsidies. According to Marco Antonio, the best way to help people is to give them the opportunity to work, not just give them money. The Slims are trying to help improve the state of affairs in the educational and medical spheres, social life of Mexico, as well as in the field of employment. Carlos Slim Helu was awarded by the World Education and Development Fund for his assistance in expanding the infrastructure of the world economy.

At one of the last solemn receptions in New York, Mr. Slim, in the presence of family members, said: "Many people want to change the world for the better for their children. I'm trying to change my children for the better so that they serve the world".

Carlos Slim Helu was born on January 28, 1940 in Mexico City. He was the fifth child of a Lebanese refugee and the daughter of a successful Lebanese merchant. His father, Julian Slim, came to Mexico in 1902, bought real estate in downtown Mexico City in 1920 and opened a supermarket.

He managed to create a successful trading business. All six of Julian's children began to work in this business, from whom he demanded "loyalty, talent and diligence." In return, children received non-children's pocket money, which they learned to "manage" starting from the first grade of school.

Carlos was lucky with his business sense. With the blessing of his father, the teenager began to engage in stock investment, and at the age of seventeen, having mastered the rules of investing, he made his first million.

In addition to the wise advice of his father - to acquire useful connections - Carlos remembered another lesson. You must always look to the future. At one time, it was thanks to this principle that Slim Sr. managed to lay the foundations of family well-being.

In the most turbulent years of the revolution and civil war, when many people thought only about today, Slim successfully used this. As soon as the revolutionary troops of Pancho Villa approached the capital, the owners of land and real estate were ready to sell everything for nothing, just to get at least something for their property.

And Slim bought up houses and plots, firmly knowing that the turmoil and war would end sooner or later, and Mexico and Mexico City would not disappear anywhere ... This means that good land will always be expensive, there will always be rich buyers for good houses, and all people will always experience the need to eat and dress...

Firmly believing in the wisdom and fairness of these simple laws, young Carlos Slim began creating his empire by opening a chain of stores. Slim's marketing strategy was entirely based on the lessons of his father: he developed a network of stores in which any Mexican, even of the most modest income, could buy everyday goods at reasonable prices.

Bread, flour, sugar, salt, matches, soap, tobacco, paper, clothing - Slim's stores had everything that any person could need. This business model simply could not work. And as a result, by the age of 26, Carlos Slim earned more than his father. His capital exceeded 400 thousand dollars.

Carlos Slim Helu's father died suddenly in 1953 when he was 13 years old. It was a huge stress for the boy.

As his fortune grew, Carlos Slim invested money in more and more new areas of activity. If you believe in the country, any serious investment will pay off with interest,” he says. Therefore, Slim, without fear of going broke, bought new interesting assets.

His companies produce cigarettes, spare parts for cars, equipment for oil production and mining, building materials, insurance, construction, passenger air transportation, production of household chemicals... Perhaps there is no industry in Latin America in which Carlos Slim would not be present.

For many years, Mexicans never tire of repeating one saying: “Before you wake up, you’re already putting money in Carlos Slim’s pocket.” Considering the diverse business interests of the Mexican oligarch, this is almost entirely true.

The Carso retail chain founded by him has spread throughout the country in the fifteen years since its creation.

The next step was the mining of ore and coal, and to this day, part of his diversified syndicate Group Carso, the Frisco Corporation became a leader in the national mining industry, as well as the chemical industry.

In addition to economic assets, Slim also acquired political ones (his contacts with high-ranking Mexican government officials are informally friendly); among them, his friendship with the President of Mexico in 1988–94, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, became especially valuable.

According to Slim's detractors, the president's personal sympathies played in his favor when the question arose of the privatization of Telmex (Telefonos de Mexico), the state-owned telecommunications company, at the time (and for a long time after) a monopolist in the domestic telecommunications market.

In the early 1990s, Slim made a major deal during which he acquired the country's largest monopolist, the telecommunications company Telmex (Telefonos de Mexico).

This event may not make much of an impression on some readers, but if you find out about the financial details of the deal, you will probably ask the question “How did he do it?”

The fact is that Carlos Slim managed to buy this company for 400 million dollars while it was valued at more than 12 billion.

This deal caused a wide public outcry, prompting mass proceedings with the highest officials of the state, including the president of the country. These proceedings ended in nothing.

And here it is worth mentioning the ability of the richest man in the world to make and maintain useful contacts. In particular, he maintained contacts with and was a sponsor of the political party PRI, which was headed by the now former President of Mexico Carlos Salinas.

It was this cooperation that allowed Carlos Slim El to provide the best conditions for his business for many years.

In 1996, Group Carso was spun off into the Carso Global Telecom holding, whose primary task was to coordinate the organizational, financial and technical means of the Elu group. Subsequently, the holding included Condumex (production of telecommunications equipment) and Prodigy (the first Mexican provider and pioneer of commercial web activities).

In 1999, Carlos Slim invested one and a half billion dollars to secure control over several US firms operating fiber optic networks and cellular telephone centers in Florida and Puerto Rico.

In February 2000, on shares with SBC, he became a co-owner of the well-known Internet provider Network Access Solutions. A joint project with Microsoft allowed the number of Internet users to triple, which caused an increase in sales of computer equipment.

Slim does not have a villa or even an apartment abroad. And all his travels are limited mainly to business purposes. Slim Elu speaks only in Spanish. He communicates in English with great difficulty and only in exceptional cases, such as at the wedding of the American ambassador in Mexico, where he was invited along with other guests, many of whom did not know Spanish.

For a long time, Slim considered charity to be a meaningless and even harmful activity. However, over the years, Carlos Slim ceased to be such an inflexible and cynical pragmatist. Over the past fifteen years, he has become increasingly involved in various charitable projects.

Now the budget of his charitable foundations is approaching $2 billion, and Slim promises to invest another $10 billion in them. True, one of the richest inhabitants of the planet has his own opinion regarding charitable activities. Carlos Slim believes that grants and donations, even the most generous ones, cannot solve poverty problems.