Carlos Slim’s Net Worth

Information

Net Worth:	$63.1 billion
Name:	Carlos Slim Helú
Nickname	None
Age:	79
Occupation:	Businessman, Investor, Philanthropist
Born:	28 January 1940
Spouse:	Soumaya Domit (1967 – 1999)
Zodiac Sign:	Aquarius
Children	6
Last Updated:	2019

Interesting Inception 

It’s time to talk about one in the top 5 richest men in the world. The man that always knew that wanted to be an entrepreneur and that only aged 11 invested in government bonds. Carlos Slim is a Mexican business magnate, engineer, inventor and philanthropist best known for being the CEO of Telmex, América Mòvil and Grupo Carso. He has an estimated net worth of $63.1 billion, and from 2010 to 2013 he was ranked as the wealthiest person in the world by Forbes. 

Early life

Carlos Slim Helù was born in Mexico City on 28 January 1940. He first learned about business from his father Juliàn (of Lebanese descent) that taught him management, finance and how to read financial statements.

At 11 he was already investing in government savings bonds, at 12 he made his first stock purchase in the Mexican back, and at 15 he became a shareholder of the largest Mexican Bank.

He majored in civil engineering in 1961 at the National Autonomous University of Mexico even though his passion was economics. Nonetheless, his mathematics studies made during college helped him become a better reader of profitable investments.

Career and Struggle

After college, he started his career as a stock trader in Mexico, working several hours per day. While working, he learned a lot about investment strategies and business, so much that he started investing his private funds that in just 4 years rendered him $400,000. With this capital, he had enough economic strength to start Inversora Bursátil. 

His Success

Five years after founding Inversora Bursátil Carlos accumulated a Net-Worth of $40 million, with which he founded Inmobiliaria Carso. The following years he mainly focussed on his investments in various industries like the soft drink, construction mining, real estate. During the rest of the 70’s he expanded into the hotels, manufacturing of cables and wires, airlines, telecommunications and mineral industries.

• During the 80′ the Mexican economy contracted rapidly bought many Mexican companies at depressed valuations and resold them at a higher value. With this strategy, he has been able to accumulate a significant part of his fortune. He adopted this strategy in many different industries, making him almost invulnerable to recession because if one market went down, he always had another one to capitalize on.

• His large fortune accumulation though occurred during the nineties, when His business Grupo Carso acquired Telmex from the Mexican government. It was a time when the government was starting to privatize much public business. Carlos Slim, being one of the initial investors, managed to leverage on that, making him huge profits out of it.

• He continues with his investments in various business until our days, expanding his hand in other markets like the US and Europe.

5 Tips to Succeed

Tip #1: Learn from other’s mistakes

Everybody says that you should learn from your mistakes. Carlos brings this concept to the next level, saying that you should also learn from other’s mistakes to maximize your success.

Tip #2: Success is Internal, not External

Carlos says that success is not an external opinion, but it is an internal state of being. He puts much importance on honesty and authenticity that he considers being human values superior to any professional, social, or political success. This means that you shouldn’t worry about what others think of you. You might have the best solutions to your problems, but if you don’t act on them because of fear, you’ll never know your outcome.

Tip #3: Be Eclectic

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur is essential for you to know as many things as possible. Not only about life but also about your environment as your brain will be able to create much more associations between ideas and find solutions that, with a narrower view, would be hard to see. 

Tip #4: Personal Life & Professional Life go Together

If you carry out a successful personal life, then it will all reflect in your professional life as well since everything is linked. He says that a good personal life makes you stronger for the challenges that your professional life will give you. 

Tip #5: Find your gift

Everybody is born with some inborn talents, but success is a combination of the talents you have and of the education/training you put yourself into. If you can tap into your own talents and work hard to make yourself a cutting-edge individual in the world, then you’ll be successful. 

Favorite Quotes

• “Wealth is like a fruit tree. The product of the tree are the fruits that you should give away to grow more trees.”
• “Success is the harmony between our soul and our emotions.”
• “A businessman cannot be only business. You have to have more interests. Life offers a lot of interests, to feel, to learn, to live.”
• “When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.”

3 Lessons we can learn from his story

Lesson 1: Live happily and without fear

You can’t let fear control you because it will make you lose in life in its many aspects. If you can live without fear or have the courage to smash your fears, then the rewards will be huge in any area of your life.

Lesson 2: Enjoy competing

Have you ever notices that when you don’t have competitors, you usually underperform? This happens because as humans we like to surpass our limits by nature and when we see that somebody else’s doing something that we believed impossible, there are internal resources start to activate and we get to new heights and personal records.

Lesson 3: Be humble

Carlos has achieved huge success over its lifetime, and despite being one of the richest men in the world, he always kept himself humble and lived an authentic life based on what he really desired more than impressing other people.

Curiosities

• He prefers to keep all his financial data in hand-written notebooks.
• Slim’s wealth is the equivalent of roughly 5% of Mexico’s annual economic output.
• He has no interest in becoming the world’s richest person.
• He met his wife when he was 24, and she was 16.
• He donated at least $4 Billion into the Carlos Slim Foundation since 2006.
• His influence in Mexico is so high that many Mexicans said they live in “Slimlandia.”
• The companies he owns account for 40% of Mexico’s stock market.
• He loaned $250 million to the New York Times.

Conclusion

Carlos Slim is and has been one of the wealthiest men in history and influencers of markets. His most famous strategy to become that wealthy has been to acquire assets at a low price to resell them at high prices thanks to his massive financial strength. If there’s a man from which you can learn successful business investing, this is one of them.