But most of them are indulgent. The last one is: “Why have you not put yourself forward as a presidential candidate?” Slim could have put there a phrase that I’ve heard him say during his speeches: “I believe a businessman can do with one dollar what a politician cannot do with two or more.”
How did this son of a Lebanese merchant get formally involved in the world of business after studying civil engineering at a state university? In 1965 he bought the bottling plant Jarritos del Sur; he then created a brokerage firm, a construction company, a mining company, a real estate operation and property development company that he called Carso, the name he would later use for his entire empire, fusing the first letters of his and Soumaya’s (his late wife’s) names. His first strategic purchase was a graphic arts company called Galas de México, of which he bought 60 percent in 1976:
At the time of purchase, Galas presented very difficult conditions: workers on strike, 1,700 clients and 25 percent of the sales depended on a single one of them, numerous products, obsolete equipment, clients annoyed about the strike, suppliers who would not send goods due to lack of payment, overdue payments to banks and creditors, unpaid tax agreements and social security, in addition to various labor disputes and a lack of industrial experience.
It was with this purchase, and 10 percent of the tobacco factory Cigarrera La Tabacalera Mexicana four years later, that Slim started to garner notoriety in the national business community. Grupo Carso was formally constituted in 1980, and between 1981 and 1984, during a period of financial crisis in Mexico, his consortium made important purchases, a move that Slim defines as the “Mexicanization of companies.” The term reflects the nationalism that tends to feature in his language. The tycoon writes:
During those years, and seeing as many large national and foreign investors did not want to continue their investments, it was viable to acquire a majority in several businesses at prices well below their real value, and even Mexicanize some of them, including Reynolds Aluminio, Sanborns, Nacobre and its subsidiaries. Later we Mexicanized, in terms of equity and operations, Luxus, Euzkadi, General Tire, Aluminio and 30 percent of Condumex. Another way in which we Mexicanized companies was by selling them to other Mexicans, as was the case with Química Perwalt in 1983, and La Moderna in 1985.
The 1980s are considered pivotal in the development of his business conglomerate. Slim enthusiastically tells the story of this growth:
As we all remember the 1980s was a critical period in our country’s history. There was a lack of confidence in Mexico’s future. At the time, while others were refusing to invest, we decided to do so. The reason Grupo Carso made this decision was a combination of self-confidence, confidence in the country, and common sense. Any rational and emotional analysis told us that doing anything other than investing in Mexico would be an atrocity. You cannot bring up and educate your teenage children (or of any age) with fear, lack of confidence, and buying dollars.
Slim equates this period of risky buying with a purchase made by his father: “The conditions in those years reminded me of the decision my father made in March 1914, at the height of the Revolution, when he bought 50 percent of the business off his brother, risking his entire capital and future.”
In actual fact, the conditions differ greatly between these two scenarios. While Slim’s father had lived through the revolutionary chaos, the tycoon made his immense fortune within the framework today’s dominant ideology: neoliberalism. It was during the intensive application of neoliberalism in Mexico, through the so-called Washington Consensus, that Slim amassed a significant share of his capital.
What is the Washington Consensus? It’s a term colloquially given to the economic model imposed by world powers on developing countries. One of the best definitions provided comes from Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, who describes it as “the dominant ideological orthodoxy before the economic crisis of 2008: that no nation can advance without reining in labor unions, eliminating trade barriers, ending subsidies, and, most importantly, minimizing the role of the government.”
More than any other businessman in the region, Slim took advantage of this turning point in history, when economies that until the 1980s had been tightly controlled by political regimes began to open up. He became the most emblematic representative of Latin American capitalism.
The list of the world’s richest people as compiled by Forbes magazine states that, in 2014, along with Carlos Slim, the richest Mexicans in the world also included Germán Larrea, with $14.7 billion; Alberto Baillères, with $12.4 billion; Ricardo Salinas Pliego, with $8.3 billion; Eva Gonda de Garza Lagüera, with $6.4 billion; María Aramburuzabala, with $5.2 billion; Antonio del Valle, with $5 billion; the Servitje Montul family, with $4.8 billion; the González Moreno family, with $4.7 billion; and Jerónimo Arango, with $4.2 billion. The combined fortune of these nine Mexican multibillionaires is $65.7 billion, less than the $72 billion that Slim was worth that year. In Mexico, there is no one who comes even close to disputing his leadership in the Forbes list.
The novelist Eduardo Antonio Parra once told me that Slim was not the first Mexican to become the richest man in the world—it was Antonio de Obregón y Alcocer, who, in the viceregal Mexico of the sixteenth century, amassed an enormous fortune exploiting the La Valenciana mine in Guanajuato, which at the time was the greatest silver producer on the planet. The systematic exploitation of its miners, who worked in semi-slavery conditions, made Obregón a figure of great renown in the colonial era, so much so that he was named a Count by King Carlos III of Spain. According to Parra, the Count of La Valenciana was so rich that for his daughter’s wedding, he ordered the path from his house to the church to be paved with gold.
De Obregón y Alcocer does not appear in an interesting Forbes issue where a series of variables are used to calculate who have been the seventy-five richest people in the history of humanity. This list is topped by John D. Rockefeller and includes Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, magnate Andrew Carnegie, automotive financier Henry Ford, pharaoh Amenhotep III of Egypt, oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty, “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt, King William II of England, Empress Cleopatra, Walmart founder Sam Walton, Roman senator Marcus Licinius Craso, and Carlos Slim himself.
Slim is not only an immensely rich man: he is also a strategist, a trait he demonstrated from an early age. His honors thesis for his degree as a civil engineer was titled “Applications of lineal programming to some civil engineering problems.” In addition to championing the use of electronic calculators, it provides a detailed analysis of the way in which the bloodiest wars in the twentieth century transpired. Young Slim’s thesis begins thus:
The fundamental intention of this research is to describe some of the techniques developed after the Second World War as well as to briefly describe some of their applications to civil engineering. These techniques[…] constitute extraordinary tools that greatly aide common sense and allow directors in general to make more rational and objective decisions (without ever replacing the human element) while making it possible to play out the potential outcomes. The effectiveness of these tools depends on the precision of the data provided and the choice of technique applied.
After acquiring control of Telmex, formerly owned by the Mexican state, and sole provider of telephony services in the country, one of Slim’s tactics was to use the capital generated by the growth of mobile telephony in Mexico, which in two years went from 8.3 million to 96.2 million users, in order to economically strengthen his company, América Móvil, and, with the enormous cash flow he possessed, purchase new telecom companies in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia. This way, the captive Mexican consumers were to Slim what the La Valenciana silver mine was to de Obregón y Alcocer in the sixteenth