Motivational Leaders: Carlos Slim

Carlos Slim, Mexican entrepreneur who became one of the wealthiest people in the world. His extensive holdings in a considerable number of Mexican companies through his conglomerate, Grupo Carso, SA de CV, amassed interests in the fields of communications, insurance, construction, energy, mining, retailing, publishing, and finance.

Slim was born into a family of Lebanese Christian immigrants to Mexico, where his father made a fortune in real estate during the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. Slim graduated with a degree in engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and by the mid-1960s he was investing in and founding a variety of businesses that became the foundation for Grupo Carso. He attained billionaire status in the aftermath of the economic crash of 1982, when the Mexican government, defaulting on foreign debts in light of a devalued peso, began nationalizing banks and scaring away business investors. Having purchased at bargain prices controlling interests in a variety of companies, Slim managed them so effectively that within the span of a decade their aggregate value soared.

For more than a dozen years, Slim’s key holding and the anchor of his success was his ownership of the former national telephone monopoly, Teléfonos de México (Telmex), which allowed him to broaden his investment portfolio into American technology and telecommunications firms such as Prodigy Inc. and SBC Communications Inc. Grupo Carso also held extensive interests in numerous Mexican companies.

Slim received several awards for his philanthropic efforts, which included establishment of the Carlos Slim Foundation, focusing on the areas of health, sports, and education through such organizations as the Carlos Slim Institute of Health, which funds research projects on public health in Mexico. In 2009 the Carlos Slim Foundation partnered with Grameen Trust—a nonprofit venture of Grameen Bank, the Bangladeshi bank founded by economist Muhammad Yunus as a means of providing small loans to poor individuals—to launch the Grameen-Carso microcredit program in Mexico.