Entrepreneur Stories: Carlos Slim Helu

He has been called the Warren Buffett of Latin America, but on the most recent Forbes list of the world's richest people, the Mexican born Carlos Slim Helu bumped the great American investor down to third spot.

With an estimated net worth of $67.8 billion, Helu is the richest person in the world. He is known for never cracking a smile, but Helu's current monopoly over the telecommunications industry in Mexico must surely make him one happy businessman.

With his hands now in all of the retail, banking and insurance, technology, and auto parts manufacturing industries, Helu shows no signs of slowing down.

There is no one in the world quite like Carlos Slim Helu. Until his recent jump to the top spot on the Forbes' list of the world's wealthiest, he was something of a mystery to the business world.

So, just how did this son of Lebanese immigrants become one of the wealthiest people in the world, and a household name across an entire continent?

“When you live for others' opinions, you are dead. I don't want to live thinking about how I'll be remembered."

Technology is going to transform people's lives and society everywhere in the world. I spend most of my time studying new technologies. My main task is to understand what's going on and try to see where we can fit in.

I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. We think that there will be an entrepreneurial reconversion' of many companies that have lived in the industrial era and now are becoming part of this new civilization.

It's not a question of arriving [at a new company] and putting in a whole new administration but instead, arriving and ‘compacting' things as much as possible, reducing management layers.

We want as few management layers as possible, so that executives are very close to the operations. We also don't believe in having big corporate infrastructures.

I’ve always said that the better off you are, the more responsibility you have for helping others. Just as I think it’s important to run companies well, with a close eye to the bottom line, I think you have to use your entrepreneurial experience to make corporate philanthropy effective.

He worked in relative isolation, with no computers in the basement of his drab two-storey office building. But, his seclusion should not be mistaken for a weakness. Indeed, his power is so great, that when he did suffer a weakness in the form of heart surgery a few years back, his companies' shares actually began to tremble.

When there is a crisis, that's when some are interested in getting out and that's when we are interested in getting in.“