Slim’s chance to change his legacy

"My new job is to focus on the development and employment of Latin America," he says proudly. Yet even his philanthropic ambitions are greeted with wariness, or outright derision, by some in Slim's home country. Professor Dresser goaded him in a newsweekly commentary for failing to give even more: "The day that you give 80 percent of your personal fortune to an unselfish cause is the day that I will become your champion." Michael Layton, director of the Philanthropy & Civil Society Project at itam, explains: "In Mexico, the perception is that public deeds are done for personal gain."

Carlos Slim was destined for business from boyhood. His father, Julian Slim Haddad Aglamaz, was a Lebanese immigrant who invested in real estate in downtown Mexico City after the country's 1910 revolution. Every Sunday he would give his son a 5-peso allowance, requiring him to record his purchases in a ledger. In Slim's office today, on a bookshelf lined with works from or about Buffett, Getty and Rockefeller, Slim keeps five ledger books from his childhood.

He pulls one down and opens it. "This was exactly 52 years ago," he says, turning to a page split into two columns. "Here I bought a soft drink for 70 centavos. Here I bought two tortas, two albums, two doughnuts." Today he still has a weakness for sweets; the seams of his snug dress shirt tug at a waistline that defies his nickname.

By age 26 Slim had accumulated $400,000 from investments and from his mother and had married Soumaya Domit, who would bear him six children. (She died of a kidney ailment in 1999, and Slim hasn't remarried; today all three of his sons and two of his three sons-in-law work in high jobs at companies he controls; a daughter works for his museum.) Equipped with a civil engineering degree and a keen eye for unloved assets, he began buying businesses in all manner of industries. There was no overarching strategy except to make a profit.

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Four decades later Slim profits on goods and services that are fundamental to the daily life of Mexicans. His companies sell them tires for their cars and build the roads they drive on; he owns 180 Sanborns, a retail-cum-restaurant chain where people shop and dine. His bank sells them mortgage loans, another outfit makes the tiles that cover their kitchen floors and his oil rigs find the fuel that heats their homes.

Slim-controlled companies, most of them cobbled together into two main holding companies, Grupo Carso and Grupo Financiero Inbursa, account for half of the combined market cap of Mexico's benchmark stock index, the 35-stock Indice de Precios y Cotizaciones. That index has soared, rising 49 percent in 2006, fueling Slim's enormous gain in wealth.

In the mid-1960s Slim bought a bottling plant and created a construction company and a real estate firm. It was the start of a conglomerate he later would name Grupo Carso, fusing the first syllables of his and his wife's first names. In 1976 he spent $1 million to buy 60 percent of Galas de México, a small printer of labels for cigarette packs. Five years later he used the cash flow from that to buy 51 percent of Cigatam, a cigarette company and one of Galas' biggest customers.

In 1982 Mexico was in the midst of economic collapse amid runaway inflation, interest rates and debt defaults. Even the boldest investors were bailing out. But Slim kept buying, grabbing assets at panic prices. "Everyone was very scared and wanted to take their money away to the U.S. and Europe," says Carlos Montemayor, chief of Marcatel, a Telmex rival in long-distance service. Slim "picked from among the suffering Mexican companies. I would have done that if I had had any money at the time."

Slim spent $13 million to buy insurance company Seguros de México in 1984, a property now worth $1.5 billion, even after four spinoffs. In 1985 he bought the Mexican retail chain Sanborns for $30 million, and now that holding turns a pretax profit of half a billion dollars. The following year he put up $50 million to buy Minera Frisco, a mining company. Then came Condumex, which made auto parts and cables, among other things; and Empresas Nacobre, a mining company; and more. Together with a few other holdings these companies are part of Grupo Carso, now worth $8 billion.

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