Once upon a time in Mexico

It is virtually impossible for Mexicans to go about their lives without in some way contributing to Carlos Slim Helu's fortune. Photo / Tranz

Until recently, articles introducing the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim have often run under some variation of the headline: "The richest man you've never heard of." That is unlikely to be the case for much longer.

Slim was last month anointed the richest man in the world by Forbes magazine, unseating Microsoft founder Bill Gates. He is worth US$53.5 billion ($75 billion), which is not a bad sum for a man born to an immigrant father in the teeming and desperately poor metropolis of Mexico City.

At first glance Slim's unseating of Gates seems counter-intuitive. Gates is a product of the modern information age that has transformed the world's economy in ways not seen since the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, Slim has made his fortune building an old-fashioned conglomerate empire, with a finger in every pie from cement to telephones to restaurants.

Gates' business hails from Seattle, one of the most cutting-edge cities in the world for technological innovation, and lives in a lavish, ultra-modern home. Slim comes from the relative backwater of Mexico, a country whose economy traditionally bleeds poor workers north across the Rio Grande in search of riches. He struggles with computers, and even mobile phones and still, to a large extent, relies on simple charts he drafts himself.

He lives in a modest six-bedroom mansion that is luxurious by the standards of most of his fellow countrymen but small when compared to many much less successful Mexicans.

Yet now Slim sits on top of the global billionaire pile, an unlikely king who wields a power known only to a few, and most of them tend to have entire countries at their beck and call. Slim has done it the old-fashioned way. He buys when prices are low, then watches his wealth accumulate. Then he buys again.

He has been the master of the fire sale, swooping in to snap up bargains in the midst of panics and sell-offs. All of which actually makes the current state of the world uniquely suited to a man of Slim's talents. For, in the middle of a recession, prices have rarely been lower.

Slim is already buying again, snapping up stakes in Citigroup and the New York Times. In 2008, he became the largest shareholder in the newspaper and, in some estimates, helped save it from bankruptcy.
Do not look for Slim's wealth to go down anytime soon or for him to disappear from the headlines. The world's sub-editors are now going to have to think of more original ways to describe a man set to become a household name.

Carlos Slim Helu was born the fifth of six children to Lebanese-Mexicans who ran successful small businesses in Mexico City. His mother, Linda, came from a distinguished family of Lebanese origin who had brought the first Arabic printing press to Mexico in the 19th century. His father, Julian Slim Haddad, was more of a classic immigrant-on-the-make who had arrived in the country in 1902 in order to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army.

In this marriage of the artsy middle-class girl with a working-class striver, it was clear that the influence of his father won out. Julian had set up a dry goods store and then invested the profits in property during the Mexican revolution. He gave all his children a ledger and taught them how to keep track of simple financial transactions. Slim took that lesson to heart.

Slim started young. Even on the school playground he would carefully monitor the trades in baseball cards he made with other children so he could see if he was coming out ahead (he generally was). By 11 he had already bought his first government savings bonds. By 15 he had invested in Banco Nacional de Mexico. He discovered a genuine fascination and obsession with numbers and the elaborate dances they make on a balance sheet. He could also see where those dances could be turned into making serious cash.

He studied civil engineering at university and kept his passion for maths going by teaching algebra on the side. On graduation he became one of a clique called "los Casabolseros" or "the stockmarket boys", young wheeler-dealers in the nascent world of the Mexican stockmarket. He started snapping up businesses and turning around a couple of companies. Then came the most important year of his life.

In 1982, Mexico plunged into economic crisis and, spurred on by a rising oil price, the government nationalised the banks. The country's elite sold off their assets. There, waiting on the sidelines, as his father had taught him, was Slim. By the time the panic was over he had picked up dozens of companies at rock-bottom prices. Slim was now a major player and he only got bigger. He grew close to the rising star of Carlos Salinas, a modernising politician who became president in 1988. Wags dubbed the pair the "Carlos and Charlie show" after a local chain of rowdy bars.

But no one was laughing when a wave of privatisations began, at what critics said were a series of undervalued deals. In 1990 Slim snapped up Telmex, the former state telephone firm. It was a sign of the times.
Salinas' privatisations created a new veneer of super wealth in Mexico. In 1991 the country had just two billionaires on Forbes' rich list. Three years later, it had 24 and Slim was among the biggest. Just as Slim had often proved the value of knowing numbers, he also proved the value of knowing people.

His empire has grown since then, and is now vast in scope. He owns controlling interests in at least 222 different companies and minor stakes in countless more. By some estimates his firm accounts for a third of Mexico's leading stockmarket index and some 7 per cent of its annual economic output. By comparison, John Rockefeller at the peak of his powers as a 19th-century industrialist was worth just 2.5 per cent of American gross domestic product.

The sheer scope of Slim's holdings is breathtaking. It is virtually impossible for Mexicans to go about their lives without in some way contributing to his fortune. Some say Mexicans are really living in "Slimlandia". They are born in Slim's hospitals, drive on his tarmac, smoke his tobacco. They build their houses from his cement, eat in his restaurants, talk on his phones, and sleep in bed linen made in his factories.

Many argue that creates an effective monopoly in too many industries, especially telecoms, allowing Slim to keep prices high. They see his tentacles stretching throughout the Mexican economy and complain that it stifles the country's ability to generate small, independent companies.

In Slim's great power they see a suffocating blanket that helps keep Mexico poor and its people still looking north for their salvation. There may well be an economic truth to that argument (though Slim would argue against it). But there is also likely a hint of racial prejudice there.

Mexicans have a mixed relationship with the world's richest man. There is pride of having one of their own at the peak of the world's financial pyramid. But there is distrust over his Lebanese background, though Slim himself says he knows no phrase in Arabic apart from swear words.

Detractors aside, there is something universally appealing about Slim.

The rich may be different to the rest of us, but Slim is a quite human billionaire. His modest mansion reflects none of the egomania so common among other industrialists and billionaires, including Gates. He owns no yacht, nor any home outside Mexico (what is the point, he says, when hotels are cheaper and less trouble). He does not spend much of his huge wealth and, indeed, is still known to drive a hard bargain for even day-to-day things. One friend recounted a holiday spent with Slim in Italy during which the billionaire haggled for two hours to knock the price of a tie down by $10.

He is still a family man and has his family over for a communal meal every week, just like millions of other Mexicans. He married well - the Lebanese-Mexican Soumaya Domit Gemayel - who was the love of his life. When she died in 1999 he built an art museum and named it after her.
He is not a fixture in the gossip columns and has already handed large chunks of the running of his businesses to his three sons. Not that he will ever retire fully.

In a life lived mostly on a curiously normal scale, Slim has indulged a monumental passion for art. His home is stuffed with sculptures by Rodin and paintings by Renoir and Van Gogh.

Yet it is still the numbers game that he loves most of all. Nor is that a game he will ever retire from. He sees his business not so much as a trading empire, but more like the works of art that adorn his walls.

"Artists don't just stop doing what they are doing because they have painted a beautiful painting," he told one interviewer who asked about his retirement plans. "They carry on until they die."

Born: Carlos Slim Helu, 28 January 1940, in Mexico City.
Married: Soumaya Domit Gemayel, another Maronite Christian of Lebanese descent. Six children.

Best of times
1982: During Mexico's crisis year while all around him were losing their heads, Slim kept his and stuck to his maxim that buying in a panic is a good idea. It was. He emerged unscathed and on course to be one of the richest men in Mexico and then the world.

Worst of times
1999: Slim's beloved wife died. Friends say he has been married to his business ever since.

What he says:
"When you live for others' opinions, you are dead. I don't want to live thinking about how I'll be remembered."

What others say:
"It's virtually cradle to grave. It's 'Slimlandia'. You are engulfed by Slim in Mexico," - George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William & Mary, in discussing Slim's impact on the Mexican economy.