Another year, another number one spot on the Forbes World Billionaires list for Mexican telecommunications and media mogul Carlos Slim. Slim’s fortune is now valued at 69 billion dollars. Despite dropping five billion dollars from his stack over last year, the owner of America Movil stayed eight billion dollars ahead of Bill Gates. According to the CIA Word Factbook, Slim is worth more than the GDP of 129 countries, including Ecuador, Syria, Cuba and Iceland.
America Movil owns Telcel and cell phone providers in 16 other Caribbean and Latin American countries and the United States. Last year, they were slapped with a one-billion-dollar fine for monopolistic business practices by the Mexican Federal Telecommunications Commission (Cofetel), although that will likely be under appeal for some time.
Slim also has business stakes in construction, mining, retail (Sanborns and Sears Mexico, among others), tobacco, The New York Times, banking, hotels, Apple and even Hershey’s.
After decades of frustrating denial in the Mexican television market, Slim plans this year to launch Ora.TV, a New York-based internet and mobile telephone channel that has already signed Larry King to host an interview show. He has also recruited Jon Housman, former president of digital journalism for News Corp. to run the new station. Housman has said the content will be entirely ad-supported and on-demand for internet-connected devices.
Other Mexicans breaking the top 100 were Ricardo Salinas Pliego, owner of the retail chain Elektra and TV Azteca, and Alberto Bailleres Gonzales and German Larrea Mota Velasco, both owners of mining companies.
Seventy-four people share the last slot on the list with an estimated one billion dollars each, including Slim’s cousin, Alfredo Harp Helu and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel.