Carlos Slim, the richest Mexicans in the world also included Germán Larrea, with $14.7 billion; Alberto Baillères, with $12.4 billion; Ricardo Salinas Pliego, with $8.3 billion; Eva Gonda de Garza Lagüera, with $6.4 billion; María Aramburuzabala, with $5.2 billion; Antonio del Valle, with $5 billion; the Servitje Montul family, with $4.8 billion; the González Moreno family, with $4.7 billion; and Jerónimo Arango, with $4.2 billion. The combined fortune of these nine Mexican multibillionaires is $65.7 billion, less than the $72 billion that Slim was worth that year. In Mexico, there is no one who comes even close to disputing his leadership in the Forbes list.
The novelist Eduardo Antonio Parra once told me that Slim was not the first Mexican to become the richest man in the world—it was Antonio de Obregón y Alcocer, who, in the viceregal Mexico of the sixteenth century, amassed an enormous fortune exploiting the La Valenciana mine in Guanajuato, which at the time was the greatest silver producer on the planet. The systematic exploitation of its miners, who worked in semi-slavery conditions, made Obregón a figure of great renown in the colonial era, so much so that he was named a Count by King Carlos III of Spain. According to Parra, the Count of La Valenciana was so rich that for his daughter’s wedding, he ordered the path from his house to the church to be paved with gold.
De Obregón y Alcocer does not appear in an interesting Forbes issue where a series of variables are used to calculate who have been the seventy-five richest people in the history of humanity. This list is topped by John D. Rockefeller and includes Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, magnate Andrew Carnegie, automotive financier Henry Ford, pharaoh Amenhotep III of Egypt, oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty, “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt, King William II of England, Empress Cleopatra, Walmart founder Sam Walton, Roman senator Marcus Licinius Craso, and Carlos Slim himself.
Slim is not only an immensely rich man: he is also a strategist, a trait he demonstrated from an early age. His honors thesis for his degree as a civil engineer was titled “Applications of lineal programming to some civil engineering problems.” In addition to championing the use of electronic calculators, it provides a detailed analysis of the way in which the bloodiest wars in the twentieth century transpired. Young Slim’s thesis begins thus:
The fundamental intention of this research is to describe some of the techniques developed after the Second World War as well as to briefly describe some of their applications to civil engineering. These techniques[…] constitute extraordinary tools that greatly aide common sense and allow directors in general to make more rational and objective decisions (without ever replacing the human element) while making it possible to play out the potential outcomes. The effectiveness of these tools depends on the precision of the data provided and the choice of technique applied.
After acquiring control of Telmex, formerly owned by the Mexican state, and sole provider of telephony services in the country, one of Slim’s tactics was to use the capital generated by the growth of mobile telephony in Mexico, which in two years went from 8.3 million to 96.2 million users, in order to economically strengthen his company, América Móvil, and, with the enormous cash flow he possessed, purchase new telecom companies in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia. This way, the captive Mexican consumers were to Slim what the La Valenciana silver mine was to de Obregón y Alcocer in the sixteenth century, and Slim capitalized on this situation to expand his empire beyond Mexico. In 2010, Slim’s empire would have 259.3 million customers in eighteen Latin American countries, including Brazil’s two main mobile phone and landline companies: Claro and Embratel.
This “silver mine” has allowed Slim to expand his various investments such that he now controls, through his mining company, Frisco, an area of land equivalent to six times the capital city of Mexico.
However, around his seventy-fifth birthday, Slim experienced slight setbacks in his Latin American expansionism. A Panamanian judge had ordered that some of his properties be seized, due to a legal controversy over the concession he received to build a hydroelectric plant during the government of Martín Torrijos. Around the same time, the Uruguayan government revoked the concession of his telecom company Claro, due to matters of legitimacy, according to an official announcement. José Mujica, one of the most celebrated presidents in the world, declared publicly before he left office that he did not wish Slim’s company to become the owner of communications in his small South American country.
And in July 2015, the non-governmental organization PODER, which promotes business transparency and has offices in Mexico City and New York, published a damning report signed by Omar Escamilla Haro, which questions the mining rights in the land owned by Slim:
In Mexico, the law prohibits the existence of “latifundios,” defined as land tenure for commercial estates exceeding 150 hectares of irrigated cotton cultivation or 300 hectares of land used to grow banana, coffee, agave, rubber, palm, vine, olive, quinine, vanilla, cacao, nopal or fruit trees. However, the agrarian and mining laws and regulations never establish the amount of land that a company can legally own. This basically eliminates the classification of latifundios for property in the hands of companies. That said, if we use the amount of land in the hands of small proprietors as a parameter of analysis, we can establish that the main shareholders for Minera Frisco, Carlos Slim and his immediate family, own land that can be classified as a latifundio.
However, the question for many Latin American political analysts was not whether Slim would be capable of continuing to accumulate more money in his remaining years of life, but what would become of that stratospheric fortune.
“Antonio de Obregón, Count of La Valenciana, seems to be a forgotten character in Mexico’s history… How do you think posterity will treat Slim?” I asked the writer Eduardo Antonio Parra. His reply:
Slim is aware that many in Mexico and Latin America despise him and he wants to do something about it. He may go down in history as a good benefactor, but that depends what he does from now on. What I think stands out about him is how he gets involved in everything, not just the telecom business. I found out that one of his companies is going to expand into the sewage system in Mexico City. That man can make money even out of shit!
In today’s world, where there are 1.4 billion people living on less than a dollar a day, what kind of success does it mean for just one person like Carlos Slim to accumulate a fortune of around $80 billion? As Albert Camus writes in The Fall, success is easy to obtain. The hard part is to deserve it. Slim smiled dispiritedly when he spotted the word “success” in my notes for our interview, and read me part of a letter he wrote in the ’90s, addressing young people: “Achieving success in material, business or professional terms: that is not success. Success is balance, harmony, family and friends, which are what matters.”
I asked him to talk about success in its most basic definition. “I think happiness is a path,” he said. “And along the way we fall, get stuck, encounter severe difficulties, and what we need to do is focus on becoming stronger through these crises so we can keep moving forward.” Then, seemingly moved, he described his life philosophy: “The important thing is to love life and everything it has to offer. Not to narrow-mindedly focus on just one project or activity, but rather to love life, to experience and understand life itself, because it’s by experiencing and understanding it that you enjoy life more profoundly.”
“What would you say to people who view you as an example of success?”
“Look, if success is seen as a way of having a family, an active family that works and has feelings and a sense of responsibility, in which all family members love each other deeply, I believe it’s a very good example: having a very functional, close-knit, deeply loved
