Carlos Slim Net Worth

Background and career

Carlos Slim Helú (Spanish: [ˈkaɾlos esˈlin eˈlu, - esˈlim -]; born 28 January 1940) is a Mexican business oligarch, investor, and philanthropist. From 2010 to 2013, Slim was ranked as the richest person in the world by Forbes business magazine. He derived his fortune from his extensive holdings in a considerable number of Mexican companies through his conglomerate, Grupo Carso. As of September 2026, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranked him as the 16th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$123 billion, making him the richest person in Latin America. Slim's corporate conglomerate spans numerous industries across the Mexican economy, including education, health care, industrial manufacturing, transportation, real estate, mass media, mining, energy, entertainment, technology, retail, sports and financial services. However, the core of his fortune derives from telecommunications, where he owns América Móvil (with operations throughout Latin America) and the Mexican carrier Telcel and Internet service provider Telmex, a state-run-gone-private company which maintained a virtual monopoly for many years after Slim's acquisition. He accounts for 40 per cent of the listings on the Mexican Stock Exchange. As of 2016, he was the largest single shareholder of non-voting shares of the New York Times Company. In 2017, he sold half of his shares.

Slim was born on 28 January 1940, in Mexico City, to Julián Slim Haddad (born Khalil Salim Haddad Aglamaz) and Linda Helú Atta, both Maronite Christians from Lebanon. He decided at a young age that he wanted to be a businessman when he grew up, and received business lessons from his father, who taught him basic financial, business management, and accounting principles by instructing him in how to analyze and interpret financial statements in addition to stressing the young Carlos in the importance of keeping accurate financial records when doing business. At the age of 11, Slim invested in a government savings bond, which taught him about the concept of compound interest. Adhering to his father's emphasis on the importance of keeping accurate financial records, he eventually saved every financial and business transaction he ever made into a personal ledger book, which he still keeps to this day. At the age of 12, he made his first stock investment, by buying shares outright of a Mexican bank. By the age of 15, Slim had become a shareholder in Mexico's largest bank. At the age of 17, he earned 200 pesos a week working for his father's company. He went on to study civil engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he also concurrently taught algebra and linear programming. Though Slim was a civil engineering major, he also displayed an interest in economics. Broadening his academic interests outside his traditional area of study beyond civil engineering, he took economics courses in Chile when he completed his engineering degree. Graduating as a civil engineering major, Slim has stated that his mathematical ability and his background of linear programming was a key factor in helping him gain a competitive edge in the business world, especially when analyzing the financial statements of prospective companies while making his business decisions as well as evaluating potential investment acquisitions and stock purchases.

After graduating from university in 1961, Slim launched his business career by starting off as a stock trader in Mexico, often working 14-hour days to make a name for himself in the Mexican business world. In 1965, profits from Slim's private business and investment ventures reached US$400,000 (equivalent to $4,086,589 in 2025), enabling him to start the stock brokerage house Inversora Bursátil. He also began laying the financial groundwork for his eventual conglomerate, Grupo Carso. In 1965, he also acquired Jarritos del Sur, a Mexican bottling and soft drink company. In 1966, worth US$40 million (equivalent to $396,923,077 in 2025), he established Inmuebles Carso, a Mexican real estate agency and holding company.

Companies in the Mexican construction, soft drink, printing, real estate, bottling and mining industries were the initial focus of Slim's burgeoning business career. He later expanded his business operations and commercial activities by venturing into numerous industries across the Mexican economy including auto parts, aluminum, airlines, chemicals, tobacco, cable and wire manufacturing, paper and packaging, copper and mineral extraction, tires, cement, retail, hotels, beverage distributors, telecommunications and financial services (Slim's Grupo Financiero Inbursa sells insurance and manages mutual funds and pension plans for millions of ordinary Mexicans). By 1972, he had established or acquired a further seven businesses in these industry categories, which included the acquisition of a construction equipment rental company. In 1980, he consolidated his business interests by forming Grupo Galas as the parent company of a conglomerate that had interests in industrial manufacturing, construction, mining, retail, food, and tobacco.

In 1982, the Mexican economy contracted rapidly. As many banks were struggling and foreign investors were cutting back on investing and scurrying, Slim began investing heavily and acquired shares in a plethora of Mexican flagship businesses outright at depressed valuations. Much of Slim's business dealings involved a simple strategy, which entails buying a business and retaining it for its cash flow, or eventually selling the stake at a greater profit in future, thereby netting the capital gains as well as reinvesting the initial principal into a new business. In addition, the complexity of Grupo Carso's corporate conglomerate structural labyrinth web of companies allows Slim to purchase a manifold of stakes across a wide range of industries, thereby making the overall conglomerate nearly recession-proof in the event that one or more industry sectors of the Mexican economy underperform. Amidst the Mexican economic downturn before its gradual recovery in 1985, Slim invested heavily by snapping up numerous Mexican flagship companies for pennies on the dollar. Among the panoply of acquisitions that Slim procured included Empresas Frisco, a mining concessionary and chemical maker, Industrias Nacobre, a copper manufacturer, Reynolds Aluminio, a Mexican aluminum concern, Compañía Hulera Euzkadi (Mexico's largest tire maker), and Bimex hotels, a hotel chain. He also became the majority shareholder of Sanborn Hermanos, a prominent Mexican food retailer, gift shop and restaurant chain, which was later incorporated as Grupo Carso's retailing arm. In 1984, Slim spent US$13 million (equivalent to $40,286,675 in 2025) to acquire Mexican insurance agency Seguros de México, and later subsumed the company into the firm, Seguros Inbursa. The value of his stake in Seguros eventually grew to being worth US$1.5 billion (equivalent to $2.329080404×109 in 2025) by 2007, after four spinoffs. Slim also acquired a 40% and 50% interest in the Mexican arms of British American Tobacco and The Hershey Company, respectively. He acquired large blocks of Denny's and Firestone Tires. From Seguros de México, Fianzas La Guardiana and Casa de Bolsa Inbursa, he formed the Grupo Financiero Inbursa, a Mexican financial services provider. Many of these corporate acquisitions were financed by the income-generating revenues and cash flows derived from Cigatam, a Mexican tobacco distributor that he purchased in the economic downturn that hit Mexico during the early 1980s. In 1988, Slim bought Nacobre, a Mexican copper manufacturer that manufactured, marketed and distributed copper and copper alloy products, along with Química Fluor, a Mexican chemical maker.

Slim realized windfall profits in the early 1990s when the Mexican government began privatizing its telecom industry. Capitalizing on the bevy of potential business opportunities that could crop up and be exploited through this political change motivated Slim and his conglomerate Grupo Carso to acquire Telmex, a landline telecommunications operator from the Mexican government. In 1990, Grupo Carso was floated as a public company initially in Mexico and then worldwide. During the same year, Grupo Carso also acquired a majority ownership of Porcelanite, a Mexican tilemaker. To ultimately realize his further commercial business ambitions and reap the material benefits that would eventually transpire through the acquisition of Telmex, Slim acted in concert later in 1990 with the French telecom operator France Télécom and the American telco Southwestern Bell Corporation to purchase the landline telecommunications service provider from the Mexican government, when the opportunity for Slim to purchase the telco presented itself and materialized when Mexico began privatizing its national industries at the turn of the 1980s. Slim was an early investment backer in Telmex, where the concomitant income-producing cash flows and revenue-generating profits of the telecommunications provider eventually formed the bulk of his private fortune. By 2006, Telmex controlled and operated 90 percent of the telephone lines in Mexico, and his wireless telecommunications company, Telcel, which was created out of the Radiomóvil Dipsa company, operated almost 80 percent of the entire country's cellphones. In 1991, he acquired Hoteles Calinda (now OSTAR Grupo Hotelero), a hotel chain and in 1993, he increased his stakes in General Tire, an American tiremaker and a distributor of aluminum profiles and aluminum concern Grupo Aluminio to the point where he had a majority interest in the company. In 1996, Slim split Grupo Carso into three separate constituent companies: Carso Global Telecom, Grupo Carso, and Invercorporación. In the following year, Slim bought the Mexican arm of Sears Roebuck. In 1999, Slim began expanding his business interests beyond Latin America. Though the bulk of his business holdings remained in Mexico, he began setting his sights on exploring the United States as a target destination to exploit potential foreign investment acquisitions and new emerging business opportunities.