Meet Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world

By Tom Leonard 819AM GMT twelve March 2010

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Telecoms aristocrat Carlos Slim Helu was ranked as the richest chairman in the universe Photo BLOOMBERG

Winds of shift from the building universe competence be unconditional new contenders in to the top reaches of the mega-wealthy, but so most about the initial non-American in sixteen years to spin the globe"s richest man seems reassuringly familiar. Carlos Slim Helú is portly, loves Cohiba cigars and his thought of circuitous down at home with the family used to be sitting his teenage sons down for an economics lesson.

The 70-year-old Mexican"s trail to an estimated $53.5 billion (�35.8 billion) happening is intentionally "Old School", as well buy companies cheap, spin them around and afterwards ruthlessly expostulate the foe out of the market.

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On Wednesday, Slim was declared by Forbes repository as the world"s richest person, ousting Bill Gates. He has been compared to the American "robber barons" of the 1890s, customarily all of them Rockefeller, Carnegie and J P Morgan rolled in to one. For even John D Rockefeller"s hold on the oil industry does not come close to relating the monopolistic energy that Slim exercises over his associate Mexicans and, increasingly, others. Whether he is creation a phone call, shopping a soft splash or coffee, smoking a cigarette, going out in the car or utilizing a income machine, it is doubtful the normal Mexican can equivocate patronising a Slim-owned blurb operation and contributing to the roughly $30 million he is estimated to consequence each day.

Through a sprawling sovereignty of some-more than 200 companies he has pronounced he has "lost count" customarily how most that ring banking, retail, airlines, mining, printing, construction, restaurants and quite telecoms, he has grown an mercantile stranglehold on his local nation so vice-like that a new word Slimlandia had to be combined to report it.

A medium lifestyle is mostly in error for a negligence for money, when it is in actuality a full of health courtesy for conserving the stuff. Although he claims not to caring about abounding lists, the aristocrat of Slimlandia, who likes to wear a bad cosmetic watch that doubles as a calculator, is positively parsimonious.

The son of a bad Lebanese immigrant, he still keeps the ledgers in that his father done him note down his supervision of his weekly five pesos slot money. (He still prefers paper and pen, does not make use of a computer and insists that advisers obstruct their briefings to one piece of paper.)

Slim lives a hold up far private from the celebrated expenditure of, say, Russian oligarchs. One of the latter competence have indulged Slim"s passion for ball by shopping his prime team, the New York Yankees. Slim, however, is calm to sojourn a fan, despite one with a computer-like mental stop for player statistics. Other indulgences are additionally understated he likes to stay up late celebration of the mass story books, quite about Genghis Khan. His Mexico City home has customarily 6 bedrooms and a small swimming pool, even if it is filled with art by Renoir, Van Gogh, Rivera and his personal favourite, Rodin.

Visitors to Mexico City will find couple of grand monuments to the richest son. Slim"s telecoms giant, Amrica Móvil operates out of a former tyre factory. The main offices of Inbursa, his monetary business, enclose a rather down-at-heel art art studio where Slim mostly likes to eat his lunch on a fold-out list in the center of the room. His companies are famously spooky with costs and disgust to borrow, a bequest that competence go behind to the days when he would write Confucian-style strictures such as "Maintain purgation in moneyed times (in times when the cow is fat with milk)" in staff handbooks.

The Slim pennies are not customarily pinched in his businesses. A contributing cause to Slim overtaking Gates (by customarily $500 million) in this year"s Forbes abounding list was that the Microsoft owner has not long ago given most of his happening afar to great causes. Slim is a relations latecomer to grand gifts to charity.

Although he not long ago affianced $6 billion for his 3 foundations, that persevere most of their work to health, preparation and mercantile development, hopes that he will spin what one of his former management team described as "the Rockefeller of Latin America" still see distant. Some stop his hapless acknowledgement in 2007 that he had no goal of "going around similar to Santa Claus" giving afar his money; or an earlier, deceptive but selfish-sounding matter to a New York cooking that whilst others longed for to leave the universe a improved place for their children, he longed for to "leave improved young kids for my world".

Of those children, his 3 grown-up sons are increasingly receiving a distinguished purpose in the family empire, generally after Slim Senior had heart surgery thirteen years ago. Slim whose wife, Soumaya, died from kidney disease in 1999 meets them, along with his dual sons-in-law, each Monday for a elementary home-cooked dish at his residence where they plead business. In keeping with his made at home image, the boys were never packaged off similar to their peers to costly unfamiliar blurb operation schools but went to Mexican colleges and afterwards learnt on the job.

Some observers have protested that Slim owes most of his blurb operation success not to monetary competence but to his growth of cosy ties with unbroken Mexican governments (and he does not customarily shorten his domestic appropriation to one party).

Slim instead attributes most of his feat to his father, Julian, who was fourteen when he emigrated from the Lebanon to equivocate troops use in the Ottoman Empire and built a happening from a ubiquitous store during the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Jean Paul Getty was additionally an early purpose indication after the younger Slim review an essay in Playboy about Getty"s blurb operation success. By 11, he was investing in supervision saving bonds; by 15, he had paid for a small shareholding in Mexico"s greatest bank.

He was value $40 million by the time he was twenty-six but unequivocally struck bullion during Mexico"s 1982 retrogression when he was means to hoover up businesses at knock-down prices. In 1990, he perceived his second big mangle when Mexico privatised the inhabitant telecoms company, Telmex, and Slim kick off the American hulk Southwestern Bell and France Telecom to waylay it up. Telmex right away operates around 90 per cent of Mexico"s write lines whilst the mobile phone network is the greatest in Latin America. He has a flourishing list of American interests, together with an eighteen per cent interest in the dialect store organisation Saks and a one per cent share of the Citigroup bank.

Cynics competence say he forsaken any hatred to gift when, in Jan last year, he suggested plans to speak up $250 million in to the New York Times journal upping his prior 6.4 per cent interest in the magnanimous publisher. If zero else, his Times stakes pulled him out of the shadows and extended his open profile.

At home, he has his critics, as one competence design of a billionaire removing so abounding in a nation with so most misery and amicable unrest. Slim has been taken to charge for charging steeply for phone calls in a nation where the smallest salary is 50 cents an hour. This connects with a renouned critique that monopolistic oligarchs, such as Slim, are gloomy Mexican mercantile potency and the capability to contest internationally.

While he has a repute as customarily friendly and unassuming, Slim is well known to have a short rage and to be thin-skinned over press criticism. Detractors note that he would have to say with rather some-more unflattering inspection if he lived in a nation where the media were less disturbed about the blurb risks of offending him.

Meanwhile, rivals complain secretly of march that he has spin as well miserly given the loss of his mother left him with zero to think about alternative than business. Slim, $18.5 billion up on the year according to Forbes, affects to be indifferent by the swings of his and his associate multibillionaires" vast fortunes. As he noticed not long ago "It"s not a competition."