Top 30 Carlos Slim Quotes

I buy companies for strategic reasons and operate them.

CompUSA was a bad decision. We stayed too much with CompUSA, and we stayed too short with Apple.

First I opened a check account. I looked at the – I looked that there was nothing of yield. So I bought some bonds. It was a bond. When I bought this bond, it was duplicated in 10 years. I think it was 10 percent.

We think that in Mexico, online trading of shares and financial instruments is not going to be as important as it is in the U.S. On days that there is a banking holiday in the U.S., you hardly see any movement here on the stock exchange.

If you are in business, you are not enjoying. You are working.

My mother born in Mexico, but was Lebanese in origin. She born 1902 the same year my father arrived to Mexico when he was 14 years old.

I studied engineering in the national university, the Universidad Autonoma, in San Ildefonso.

You want to have a toy and another toy, and that’s not maturity. The biggest things in life are not materials.

I love baseball. And American Football, too. But not rugby.

I don’t have business with any politicians.

Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business.

The year 1983 was crazy. People wanted to sell not only their investments… but also their companies.

You don’t need to raise taxes on rich people, because they create capitalization and investment. But you need to tax speculation – meaning capital gains.

You should have more time for you during all of your life – not when you’re 65 and retired.

It’s important to give a better country to your children, but it is more important to give better children to your country.

If Wal-Mart invests a billion dollars and others invest $100 million, Wal-Mart is going to grow more.

I think that anything that has privileges have responsibility and all people that is clear about their responsibility has compromise.

We really think highly of the executives at SBC. And Microsoft is one of the great companies of the 21st century. It is in all of our best interests to work together. In this new wave of technology, you can’t do it all yourself; you have to form alliances.

At 25, I made many companies. I was thinking more like a businessman or entrepreneur than a CEO. I created many companies, small companies, medium companies. I tried to be involved in many kinds of activities, in finance, in real estate, in mining.

Any personal crisis – you have to use it to get stronger.

How can you be on top of the things you do? I think when you are involved in a business, first of all you need to know the business. After that you know the business, you can – the numbers tell you what is happening. You can read with the numbers.

In high school, I loved history. I also loved cosmography, algebra. Mexico is so rich in culture and history, and I have always enjoyed that.

The artistic part of us all – I think that the easiest way to appreciate this – is through architecture. Architecture is very impressive; the beauty of buildings, temples.

There are people who are good for letters and others that are good for numbers.

You cannot make thousands of universities or hundreds of thousands of professors, but with technology and the Internet you can have great courses and make a digital university.

I studied engineering in the national university, the Universidad Autonoma, in San Ildefonso. There is art everywhere, murals on the walls. It’s beautiful.

Well, when I was very young, maybe 12 years, I began to make investments.

Our philosophy is you need to give nonprofit money for health, nutrition, education, culture, and sports.

We don’t take anything when we pass away, and we need to do with the sense of responsibility.

You need to support human development and human capital as much as possible. And we’ve had 25 years of programs, great programs. We supported 125,000 surgeries. We fund 15,000 scholarships every year for college and higher education. We gave bicycles for rural areas. We gave laptops.