Carlos Slim looks remarkably relaxed for someone who just lost nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars.
It’s been a bad day on the Mexican Bolsa, which means it’s been a bad day on paper for Slim, Mexico’s ultimate tycoon. This late-February hiccup in the market has reduced his net worth by roughly $720 million. When your fortune is measured in the tens of billions and tied to stock prices and currency movements, you learn to take the long view.
After all, this is Carlos Slim we’re talking about — the John D. Rockefeller of Mexico. Not so long ago, before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos amassed their mindboggling wealth, Slim was the richest person on Earth. Rest assured, Slim is doing just fine: Today he’s worth $82 billion, placing him 18th in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
And so, for a change, Slim is pondering a number that doesn’t have a dollar sign in front of it: his age, which is 85.
Time catches up with everyone, and that includes the man Mexico knows as El Ingeniero, the Engineer.
Slim, tie-less in a dove-gray suit, is slower and thinner than he used to be. His face is softer, the circles deeper, but his dark eyes glow with merriment. He’s having fun.
“Painters don’t retire. Many people don’t retire,’’ Slim says in low, steady voice. “If you retire, you’re out.’’
Maybe, just maybe, the best is yet to come, he offers.
“I’m only 85,’’ El Ingeniero says.
Here, there, everywhere
Carlos Slim only occasionally gives interviews, but this one will stretch on for nearly 2½ hours. On his mind on this Tuesday evening: Donald Trump (Slim says he’s a fan, despite the president’s insulting remarks about Mexico), Musk (he agrees with his views on government spending, despite reservations about the Tesla Inc. CEO’s chainsaw approach to Washington), and Slim’s own plans to divide his fortune among his many heirs (the family gets along surprisingly well, its patriarch says).
Slim accumulated his dynastic wealth by acquiring undervalued assets, including a state phone monopoly that remained dominant for decades, much the way Rockefeller thrived by controlling oil refining during America’s Gilded Age. To many Mexicans, his wealth is a source of national pride. Others see him as an embodiment of crony capitalism — a savvy operator who understands power and isn’t afraid to wield it.
Slim is everywhere in Mexico. He owns the mobile-phone company Telcel, Sanborns stores and restaurants, Sears and even Saks Fifth Avenue. His empire includes the telecommunications company Telefonos de Mexico, or Telmex, which he acquired when Mexico privatized the company in 1990.
Slim came to widespread attention in the U.S. in 2009, when he sank $250 million into the then-struggling New York Times Co., an ultimately lucrative investment that he’s long since exited.
In Mexico, where the average worker makes around $3,800 a year, the Carlos Slim story has taken on near-mythical dimensions. Slim’s father, originally named Khalil Salim, arrived from Lebanon in 1902, at the age of 14. He changed his name to Julian and, with his brother Jose, opened a dry-goods store in Mexico City, just as the Mexican Revolution was breaking out. Julian felt in his bones the advice usually credited to Baron Rothschild: Buy when there’s blood in the streets. Before long, in what would become a hallmark of his son’s career, Julian began buying when the panicked crowd was selling. He later shrewdly unloaded his store just before the Wall Street crash of 1929.
In 1952, when Carlos was 12, he got a lesson he’s carried with him for the rest of his life. That year, Julian gave each of his six children a bank savings book. He stressed the importance of family and financial prudence. Before long, young Carlos wasn’t merely stashing his allowance money in the bank — he was buying stock in Banco Nacional de Mexico. Numbers seemed to speak to him, and his portfolio kept growing. He attended his first board meeting while he was still in his teens.
In 1957, Slim entered Mexico’s National Autonomous University to study engineering (hence the nickname). He was an excellent student — he was enlisted to teach classmates linear optimization — but soon decided that business and investing was where he’d make his mark.
Cashing in on crisis
And did he ever. Few have come to dominate an economy the way Slim does in Mexico. Over the decades, he’s capitalized on one crisis after another to expand his reach. When the Latin American debt crisis struck in the 1980s, Slim invested heavily in a string of companies like Reynolds Aluminum, General Tire and British American Tobacco. During the peso “Tequila Crisis” in the 1990s, he transformed Mexico’s telecommunications industry by introducing prepaid cards to make calls on Telcel’s network. “At the time, we thought — fixed phones are inside homes, but people carry mobiles with them, and there’s more people than houses, so that’s where we saw the great potential,” he said.
Along the way, Slim reshaped Telmex and Telcel into America Movil SAB, which grew into a regional powerhouse that also operates in Austria and some eastern European countries. The government recently authorized Slim’s stake in Telekom Austria to grow to 60%, and Slim is interested in buying the additional shares, he said.
Today Slim and his heirs control nearly 300 companies, including six public ones — America Movil, Grupo Carso SAB, Grupo Financiero Inbursa SAB, Minera Frisco SAB, Impulsora del Desarrollo y el Empleo en America Latina SAB (Ideal) and Operadora de Sites Mexicanos SAB (Telesites) — that account for roughly 15% of the nation’s stock-market value.
One thing Slim hasn’t been able to get his hands on in Mexico? A pay-TV license. The telecom regulator banned his companies from acquiring one given his dominance in the industry. “But that has, in turn, made us more aggressive in streaming,” he said. “There’s more to do there, like offering more live sports, which Netflix is starting to do. People like that.”
Presidential perspectives
Fifteen presidents have occupied the grand Palacio Nacional since Slim was born 85 years ago. Today, as President Trump remakes the global order from Washington — and, once again, digs at Mexico on immigration, trade and more — even El Ingeniero must navigate a shifting political landscape.
In the 1990s, Slim’s reputation suffered from his association with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who became synonymous with fraud and corruption. Salinas sold him the Telmex concession in a deal that would be scrutinized and questioned for decades, though Slim has always maintained he acted transparently and won a public auction fair and square, in partnership with respectable operators Southwestern Bell and France Telecom.
More recently, Slim seemed to deftly handle left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who initially clashed with business leaders (Slim invested in Lopez Obrador’s $30 billion Maya Train, a controversial project connecting tourist hubs like Cancun to the jungles and archeological sites of the country’s southern Yucatan Peninsula.)
So far, Slim is impressed by Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, who’s won praise for handling the mercurial Trump. (He speaks to Sheinbaum every few months and occasionally exchanges messages with her.)
Energy, a key focus for Trump, is front of mind for Slim, too. On March 18, Sheinbaum confirmed that Mexico’s state-owned oil giant, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, was in talks with companies owned by Slim about an investment in two of the country’s most promising crude oil and natural gas fields. Slim is already involved there, having bought 80% of Talos Mexico, which gave him access to a mega oil field known as Zama. Sheinbaum is now talking up new types of partnerships between the state and the private sector — and Slim is ready.
Among other things, he’s also betting Trump’s drill-baby-drill approach will eventually pay off for one of his U.S. investments: refiner PBF Energy Inc., whose stock has fallen sharply over the past year.
As for Trump, Slim is cautiously optimistic. Yes, Mexico’s economy — and, by extension, Slim’s businesses — could suffer if Trump follows through with his promised tariffs. That aside, Slim says the U.S. needs to rein in government spending; invest in high-value, 21st-century industries; and finally confront the economic rise of China.
“The U.S. doesn’t have any other alternative rather than changing how it does things,’’ Slim says. Musk’s chaotic effort to cull federal employees and entire departments is disruptive — “I think he’s done a poor job of it,” Slim says of Musk — “but that deficit is crazy.”
Slim thinks Trump is getting good advice and that he’s aware the world is integrating without the U.S., which is why he’s using tariffs as a negotiation tactic.
“What’s good about President Trump, and it’s really admirable and smart, is that he knows what’s happening in the world,” he says. He thinks tariffs will be temporary.
How grandpa governs
Slim has also thought deeply over the years about the rise and fall of business empires. With wife Soumaya, who died in 1999 of kidney disease, Slim has three sons, three daughters and 23 grandkids. That’s a lot of potential for squabbles and succession battles. So El Ingeniero is trying to make sure they put family first, gathering the whole clan for lunch every Wednesday.
“It’s not mandatory, but they all come,” he says.
Most of the children, as well as some of their spouses, work in the family businesses, so the reporting lines are already clear for a future without Slim. His eldest, Carlos, is chairman at America Movil; while a son-in-law, Daniel Hajj, is the CEO. Marco Antonio is Inbursa’s chairman, and Patrick is CEO at Grupo Sanborns. Daughters Soumaya, Vanessa and Johanna lead some of the group’s philanthropic and art endeavors.
Slim’s official title these days is America Movil chairman emeritus. “My job is mainly to see if something’s not doing well, to correct it; and if something’s doing well, to develop that potential,” he said.
Six grandkids are now working for him in some capacity, he said. “There’s no obligation for them to work in the group; it’s only if they want to,” he said.
If you work for Grandpa Slim, you’re doing it with the understanding that you are part of something bigger, and no one gets special treatment (except for a special gift for getting married). Grandkids all earn the same salary — “it doesn’t matter where they are” — and receive a 3% stake in the family’s closely held holding company when they turn 18. There are no dividends, so younger generations don’t get accustomed to living off of redistributed profits.
“That’s why it has grown so much,” Slim says of the holding company, Control Empresarial de Capitales SA. He set up the company three months before getting married, he said.
When the time comes, Slim’s fortune will be split among his children in an amount proportional to the number of kids they each have, he said.
One of the holding firm’s most lucrative investments in recent years was the New York Times, which paid back his $250 million loan early in 2011. He exercised warrants he was granted in the deal in 2015 and began selling them off months later.
But the deal has had a lingering aftereffect, long after Slim was fully divested. Due in part to conspiracy theories that circulate on social media, people still think he’s a major shareholder and that he has some influence over what the newspaper writes. (He’s not, and he doesn’t.)
“They’re crazy because every time the New York Times says something, they always think that it’s me, but we don’t have any interest, any influence, we never asked for anything,” he says.
Musk recently reposted false claims by another X user that Slim was still a major owner of the Times and also accused him of being linked to organized crime, drawing a rebuke from Sheinbaum among others. The dust-up happened around the same time America Movil disclosed it had dropped a plan to work with Musk’s SpaceX to offer internet access in rural areas. Slim said that was just a business decision related to the government’s rules for coverage requirements.
Despite the headache, Slim has little regret over the Times deal. If anything, he just wishes the company hadn’t let another lucrative opportunity get away.
“They did some operations that we didn’t know about that were very bad,” he said, referring to the Times having bought the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion and then selling it for $70 million.
“They used to have the Red Sox team and the stadium and then they sold it for nothing — very cheap,” he said. “It would have been more interesting to buy that.”