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 Business News | May 2007 
Slim’s Pickings: $53BN and Counting
 lebaneselobby.org
| | In recent months, Slim Helu has begun pouring money into his foundation and has promised to donate up to $10bn over the next four years to fund health and education programs in Mexico. |
Bill Gates once said that nothing good came from being the richest man in the world. The money was fine, but the attention was awful. Luckily for him, he could soon lose his title to Carlos Slim Helu, 67, a jowly, implacable Mexican businessman ripped from the pages of a Latin American novel.
On the latest Forbes list of the world's richest people, Slim Helu's fortune was estimated at $53bn, just $3bn behind Gates. It has grown by $19bn in the past year alone, taking him past the American investor Warren Buffett.
Not that you would ever guess from his public demeanour.
Slim Helu's heavy features remain undisturbed by even a hint of a smile. Unlike the avuncular Buffett, he never cracks a joke. And unlike Gates, he has belittled the idea of charitable giving, saying he is in the business of fixing problems, not "going around like Santa Claus".
There is, of course, a basic problem with Slim Helu's fortune. How did he amass it in a country which ranks 55th in GDP per capita, between Libya and Equatorial Guinea?
Few people credit his wealth to pure entrepreneurial vigour. He has long had ties to governments of every political stripe that have guaranteed his main businesses virtual monopoly status. Many Mexicans have come to hate the fact that they can't get through the day without paying money to Slim Helu. He provides everything from telephone services to roads, insurance, plastics, books, CDs, restaurants, car parts and on and on. His companies make up around half of the value of the Mexican stock exchange and are equivalent to 7 per cent of Mexico's GDP. Gates would have to be worth close to $800bn to carry similar weight in the United States.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development recently reported that Mexican small businesses paid among the highest telephone fees in the world, around $132 per month versus $60 per month in the United States. Slim Helu controls 90 per cent of the Mexican landline business and 70 per cent of the mobile phone industry. The event that transformed Slim Helu from a rich man to a very rich one was the privatisation of state-owned Mexican businesses in the early 1990s. He and the small cadre of families who dominate the country's business garnered control of vast tracts of industry at discount prices and have since consolidated that control with the help of the government.
Depending on your point of view, this represents either the growing pains of a true capitalist economy or the abuse of power and wealth by a corrupt ruling class in a developing country. Slim Helu has become the whipping boy for those who believe the latter.
In recent months, Slim Helu's aversion to philanthropy has changed. He has begun pouring money into his foundation and has promised to donate up to $10bn over the next four years to fund health and education programs in Mexico. He has already given away millions for scholarships, contact lenses and bicycles for poor children. But his pledges are still a fraction of the money given away by Gates and Buffett.
In June, Slim Helu is expected to attend a party thrown by Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street for the American friends of the Tate Gallery. In the past, when he was just another billionaire toiling away in his bare, basement office in the suburbs of Mexico City, no-one would have blinked an eyelid at his trip to London. Now, of course, they will be asking why a man is taking money from poor Mexicans and redirecting it to a British art gallery.
Life at the top of the rich list, as Gates could tell him, can be a turbulent ride. |
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