What makes carlos slim rich

Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Executive Lifestyle. Katie Warren. The year-old Mexican billionaire controls America Movil, the largest mobile-phone operator in Latin America, and holds stakes in several other publicly traded companies, including The New York Times.

Slim also owns Sears Mexico, which has been growing and opening up new stores despite the chain filing for bankruptcy in the US. Slim lives a surprisingly frugal lifestyle for a billionaire: He doesn't own any yachts or planes and he's lived in the same house for more than 40 years.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. In , Slim ranked as the fifth-richest person in the world, but his fortune has taken a major hit over the past few years. He also has holdings in banking and mining, as well as interests in the construction industry in Mexico. Slim was born to Lebanese immigrant parents in Mexico City in Slim's father was successful in both retail and real estate, and Carlos inherited his business after his death in Slim holds a deep love for his country.

Though Slim is known best as the chief shareholder of America Movil and the founder of the Grupo Carso conglomerate, his riches also result from many other business ventures.

Slim has a clear strategy for making money: He acquires struggling companies and transforms them into multibillion-dollar holdings before selling his stake at a profit. But Slim announced in that he would sell almost half his New York Times shares by In , Slim surpassed Bill Gates as the richest man in the world; it was the first time in 16 years that the world's richest man wasn't from the US. Slim's presence is all over Mexico.

A man like Carlos Slim doesn't just keep billions of dollar bills stacked in a vault someplace. Here is where this billionaire stashes some of his money. Slim holds stakes in many Mexican companies through his conglomerate, Grupo Carso.

Carso has accumulated a global portfolio of investments in companies dealing in communications, real estate, construction, airlines, media, technology, retailing, restaurants, industrial production, and finance. Slim also has investments in various South American firms in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, including a controlling interest in Banco Inbursa. In Mexico, he owns over 20 shopping centers, including ten in Mexico City, and operates stores in the country under U.

The property is included in the National Register of Historic Places. He also has approximately eight acres of prime Beverly Hills real estate at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards. Carlos Slim's everyday car is a custom Mercedes 4x4, which he likes to drive by himself even through heavy Mexico City traffic, and a beefed-up Chevy Suburban for more rugged occasions.

He also owns a rare Bentley Continental Flying Spur, a powerful luxury sedan. Although he eschews private jets, Slim does fly occasionally on commercial airplanes, and sometimes he rides in the Telmex helicopter. While it's certainly an achievement to own one-of-a-kind real estate and rare cars, it is another to own precious, irreplaceable collectibles.

This is also where he keeps his collection of rare coins, historical documents, and religious relics. The artwork and artifacts inside are worth almost a billion dollars. Distributed between six main exhibition rooms, it is one of the largest museums of its kind in Latin America.

The Soumaya Museum individual pieces and collections. Much of the museum's holdings are from Slim's own collection. Recently, Carlos Slim has been allocating chunks of his business empire to his three sons and three daughters. Rather than simply handing his children cash, he is carving up and giving control of his businesses to them to run. Because Slim is in his 80s, this sort of estate planning ensures that his companies and wealth will continue to grow even after his death.

And his father happily obliged with business lessons about management, reading financial statements and keeping accurate financial records. In , when Carlos was only 13 years old, his father died. When Slim graduated high school, he went on to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he studied civil engineering while teaching algebra and linear programming.

While studying civil engineering, Slim also took an interest in economics, taking a series of courses on the subject in Chile after he graduated in He went into finance shortly afterward, working long, grueling days as a stock trader in Mexico City. One of his biggest opportunities was the peso crisis in the early s, coupled with a steep decline in oil prices. Some examples are Cigatam the country's second-largest cigarette maker , Reynolds Aluminum, General Tire and the Sanborns chain of stores.

He even has a stake in The New York Times. Perhaps the biggest piece of Slim's wealth comes from telecommunications. Carlos Slim was at the helm of Grupo Carso and, as such, took over at Telmex. In the U. In Austria, the company owns a majority stake in Telekom Austria. Slim's telecom empire reaches almost every country in Latin America.

Yet it wasn't necessarily a deep knowledge of technology or telecommunications that made the company what it is today. Slim has often said that his strategy is to reinvest the profits into the business itself and fuel growth. The pattern is typical of Slim's business deals over the course of his life — buy an asset, reinvest and sell at a profit. Slim's strategy has been to buy up sometimes troubled companies and try to turn them around. For more, see " Value Investing ". Also, the conglomerate structure allows him to have stakes in such a diverse range of industries that his wealth is well prepared to maneuver global financial turbulence.

His stocks might lose value in a general market downturn that affects the whole economy, but a problem in the telecommunications industry won't hurt his numbers much because some other sector will likely be doing reasonably well. Slim is also less interested in the fine details of the businesses he buys.

Any transaction is just that—the goal is to sell his stake at a profit later. Another issue is monopolistic practices. One of the assets Slim picked up with Telmex was one of the largest Mexican makers of copper wire. However, when the Mexican government attempted to increase competition in the phone business, it didn't account for the fact that new companies had to pay Telmex an interconnection fee.

Telmex simply set such fees very high, making it tougher for any other provider to undercut prices, especially for long distance calls. Even when anti-monopoly laws force Slim's companies to sell assets, there's a sense that it might just be an end-run around the law. For example, in January , a Mexican court ordered Telmex to stop selling a division that holds fiber-optic lines and telephone poles.

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