Slim learned compound interest from a bond at age eleven
Carlos Slim Helú, born 28 January 1940 in Mexico City to Maronite parents of Lebanese origin, built a conglomerate across telecom, industry, retail, and more. Rankings have repeatedly placed him among the world's richest. At eleven he bought a government savings bond that taught him compounding—a lesson he credits to his father's emphasis.
Forbes ranked Slim the richest person on Earth from 2010 to 2013, and Bloomberg placed him 16th in September 2026. His father, born Khalil Salim Haddad Aglamaz, taught him to read financial statements and keep careful accounts; Slim still records every transaction in a personal ledger. He bought shares in a Mexican bank at 12. He studied civil engineering, took economics courses in Chile afterward, and credits his grounding in mathematics and linear programming with giving him an edge.
After graduating in 1961 he traded stocks, often working 14-hour days, and by 1965 his ventures earned $400,000, enough to open the brokerage Inversora Bursátil and start building what became Grupo Carso. Early holdings spanned construction, soft drinks, printing, bottling and mining. His method was simple: buy businesses, keep them for their cash flow or sell the stake later for more. When Mexico's economy collapsed in 1982 and foreign investors fled, he bought flagship firms cheaply, among them the miner Empresas Frisco, the copper maker Nacobre, Reynolds Aluminio and Euzkadi, the country's largest tire company.
The early-1990s privatisation of telephones made his fortune. Grupo Carso went public in 1990, and later that year Slim joined France Télécom and Southwestern Bell to buy the state landline company Telmex. In 1996 he split Carso into three companies and a year later bought Sears Roebuck's Mexican business. América Móvil, spun out of Telmex in 2000 with a $15 billion New York listing, took stakes in carriers across Latin America, and telecoms remain the core of his wealth through América Móvil and the mobile carrier Telcel.
From 1999 he looked north, joking circles in Mexico said, because nothing was left to buy at home. In 2003 he took large stakes in American retailers including Barnes & Noble, OfficeMax, Circuit City, Borders and CompUSA, and he invested in the prepaid phone company Tracfone. His empire also stretches into health care, education, media, energy and sport.
Source: Carlos Slim
