Carlos Slim

Slim’s father emigrated from Lebanon to Mexico, and his mother descended from Lebanese immigrants. The fifth of six children, he learned bookkeeping early and lost his father at thirteen.⁠[2]

Born in Mexico City on January 28, 1940, Slim completed civil-engineering studies at UNAM in 1961 and established Inversora Bursátil in 1965.⁠[1]

During Mexico’s 1982 crisis, Slim acquired undervalued assets. In 1990 his group and French and American partners acquired state telephone company Telmex; he subsequently promoted prepaid mobile service.⁠[2]

Slim bought 6.4% of the New York Times Company in 2008 and lent it $250 million the following year.⁠[2]

On June 22, 2015, the Carlos Slim Foundation announced a nonprofit partnership with Holmes and Theranos to incorporate testing into Mexico’s CASALUD program. The announcement’s clinical and efficiency benefits were the partners’ expectations, not completed independent validation.⁠[3]

Vanity Fair corrected its 2016 report: the investor on an email list was a Grupo Financiero Inbursa executive, not Slim personally.⁠[4]

A Slim-affiliated company invested about $30 million in TheranosTheranosTheranos was a blood-testing company founded in 2003 by Elizabeth Holmes and based in Palo Alto, California, which offered retail testing with Walgreens and was valued at up to $9 billion before regulatory sanctions and criminal charges over alleged fraud in its technology and financial claims led to its dissolution in 2018.Open the full entry.⁠[5]