Agencies
Mexico - Aug 09:With nearly $60 billion, Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim Helu has officially overtaken Microsoft founder Bill Gates for the title of the world’s richest person, Fortune magazine reported in its latest edition.
The strong performance by Slim’s holdings on the Mexican stock exchange in the last couple of months has pushed Gates into second place, after the US software magnate held the title for at least a decade. “By our calculations, the 67-year-old Slim has amassed a $59 billion fortune, based on the value of his public holdings at the end of July,” Fortune said in its latest edition, due to hit newsstands this week.
While Slim has been steadily expanding his mobile phone and other businesses throughout Latin America, “Slim’s fortune is growing at a stunning clip. His net worth jumped $12 billion this year alone,” Fortune said. Slim’s family holdings represented more than five per cent of Mexico’s gross domestic product last year and companies under his control make up one third of the Mexican stock market, according to Fortune.
The magazine labelled him a modern-day John D Rockefeller, the US industrialist who amassed a huge personal fortune in the early 20th century. The 67-year-old tycoon controls more than 200 companies – he says he’s “lost count”. The portly Slim is a study in contradiction. He says he likes competition in business, but blocks it at every turn. He loves talking about technology, but doesn’t use a computer and prefers pen and paper.
He hosts everyone from Bill Clinton to author Gabriel García Márquez at his Mexico City mansion, but is provincial in many ways, doesn’t travel widely, and proudly says he owns no homes outside of Mexico. In a country of soccer fans, he likes baseball. He roots for the sport’s richest team, the New York Yankees.
Admirers say the hard-charging Slim, an insomniac who stays up late reading history and has a fondness for reading about Ghengis Khan and his deceptive military strategies, embodies Mexico’s potential to become a Latin tiger. His thrift in both his businesses and personal life is a model of restraint in a region where flamboyant Latin American business tycoons build lavish corporate headquarters and fly to Africa on exotic hunting jaunts.
Slim’s holdings include banking, automotive and especially telecoms interests. His Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) controls 92 per cent of the country’s phone lines. However, he has a reputation for austerity, rather than flamboyance. His America Movil wireless service, which claims a 70 per cent market share, is based in a converted tire factory. He was known for sporting a plastic watch.
His father ran a store in Mexico City after immigrating from Lebanon in 1902 and went on to buy commercial real estate during the 1910 revolution. Slim studied engineering in the 1960s before starting a stock brokerage. He soon began to acquire companies, turning around a number of failing businesses during the crippling Latin American economic crisis of the 1980s.
By the end of the decade, he was considered one of Mexico’s top businessmen. He started buying into Telefonos de Mexico in 1990, when he partnered with France Telecom and what is now AT&T to pick up a 20 per cent share of the state-owned Mexican company for some $2 billion, according to Fortune. The tycoon has brushed off criticism that Telmex is effectively a monopoly, saying earlier this year: “When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered.”
He once derided Gates and fellow philanthropist and investment guru Warren Buffett – until recently the world’s second richest man – for giving away so much of their wealth, reportedly saying: “Poverty isn’t solved with donations.” Building businesses, he was reported to have said, did more for society than “going around like Santa Claus”.