Carlos Slim

Carlos Slim was born in Mexico City in 1940, the son of Julián Slim Haddad, a Lebanese Christian immigrant who had arrived in Mexico as a teenager fleeing conscription in the Ottoman Empire and built a modest dry goods store into a successful business through careful, unglamorous bookkeeping. His father insisted the children learn to track every expense from an early age, a habit Carlos kept for the rest of his life.

He studied civil engineering and began investing small sums in the Mexican stock market and real estate as a young man, founding a brokerage and construction group in the 1960s that steadily bought stakes in undervalued companies. His breakthrough came during Mexico's 1982 debt crisis, when he bought distressed companies at low prices from panicked owners, betting that the economy would recover, a bet that paid off handsomely over the following decade.

In 1990, when the Mexican government privatised the state telephone monopoly Telmex, Slim led the group that acquired it, and over the following years built it, along with the mobile operator América Móvil, into a business controlling much of Latin America's telecommunications infrastructure. The dominance of his telecoms companies drew sustained criticism from regulators and rivals over high prices and limited competition.

He has given large sums through his foundations to health, education and cultural projects in Mexico, and has spoken often about his father's insistence that a business built on debt was fragile, while one built on careful records and patience could survive any crisis.