August 07, 2007
Mexican Telecom Tycoon Unseats Gates As World's Wealthiest
Fortune magazine reports that Mexican telecom giant Carlos Slim Helú surpassed Microsoft titan Bill Gates as the richest man in the world when his fortune climbed to the $59 billion mark at the end of July, compared with Gates' estimated net worth of $58 billion.
In a lengthy profile, Fortune's Stephanie Mehta details how Slim, 67, grew from the son of an immigrant Lebanese shopkeeper into "a latter-day Latin American J.P. Morgan."
But unlike Morgan and Gates, Slim doesn't quite get the royal treatment in his home country. All told, his family's holdings made up more than 5 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product last year, and his companies represent about one-third of the Mexican stock exchange. The breadth of his corporate empire has bred resentment in the economically depressed country, where the privatization ushered in at the end of the 20th century was supposed to breed competition, not monopolies.
"Slim is one of a dozen fat cats in Mexico who impede that country's growth because they run monopolies or oligopolies," professor George Grayson at the College of William & Mary told Fortune. "The Mexican economy is highly inefficient, and it is losing its competitive standing vis-a-vis other countries because of people like Slim."
In the article, Slim's son, Carlos Jr., counters that claim, calling accusations against his father "not well-founded" and an unfortunate byproduct of being "successful in business." Perhaps taking a page out of the Gates playbook, Slim has been working to improve his public image lately by pledging to spend billions of dollars on various charitable and philanthropic causes.
The New York Times interviewed Slim in June and gave a snapshot of the telecom tycoon's empire.
