Bill Gates told the Indian podcaster Raj Shamani in April last year that his three children will inherit less than 1% of what he owns. “It’s not a dynasty,” he said. “I’m not asking them to run Microsoft. I want to give them a chance to have their own earnings and success.”
Six months later, at a press conference in Mexico City, Carlos Slim was asked what happens to Telmex after he dies. He has controlled the phone company since 1990. His answer, reported by Infobae, was that the question is settled and that he settled it with his children. It will not be sold in his lifetime, and it will not be sold in theirs.
Roughly $230bn sits between the two men. In the space of six months each of them said in public where it goes, and the two answers have almost nothing in common.
Table of Contents
What they agree on
Neither is pretending he gets to keep any of it.
Gates announced last May that the Gates Foundation will close on 31 December 2045 and that he intends to have given away virtually everything by then. People will say plenty of things about him after he dies, he said, and he is determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them.
Slim has said something close to the same thing. Businessmen, he told a press conference in 2024, are temporary administrators of wealth. “I’m not taking anything with me when I die,” he said. “I don’t even know where I’ll be buried.”
They start from the same premise and reach opposite conclusions.
Where Slim’s money came from
Slim is the less familiar of the two names in Britain. He is 86, born in Mexico City in 1940 to a Lebanese immigrant father who, Forbes has reported, gave him a weekly allowance of five pesos on condition he wrote down everything he spent it on. He studied civil engineering at the national university, set up his first holding company in 1966, and bought hard when Mexico’s debt crisis in 1982 sent asset prices through the floor. Telmex came later, in 1990, when a group he led bought it from the state in a privatisation. Most of what he holds now sits inside Grupo Carso and Amรฉrica Mรณvil.
Gates needs less introduction. He co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and turned 70 last October.
Who was richer, and when
Forbes’ real-time tracker had Slim at roughly $125bn in late July and Gates at about $105bn. Both figures move daily.
The order between them has changed repeatedly.
| Years | Top of the Forbes list |
|---|---|
| 1995 to 2007 | Bill Gates, in most years |
| 2008 | Warren Buffett |
| 2009 | Bill Gates |
| 2010 to 2013 | Carlos Slim |
| 2014 to 2017 | Bill Gates |
| 2018 onwards | Jeff Bezos, then others |
Both have since been overtaken by a newer set of American technology fortunes. Slim currently sits around 14th on the Forbes list and Gates around 19th.
Why Slim said no to the Giving Pledge
Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett launched the Giving Pledge in 2010, asking the world’s wealthiest people to commit at least half their fortunes to charity. Slim, the richest man alive at the time, declined.
He explained himself to CNBC in January 2011. His money was not cash in an account. It was inside Telmex, Amรฉrica Mรณvil and the mining businesses, and handing over half of it would mean selling them. He asked who the buyer would be. Nobody in Mexico could afford them, he said, so they would end up in foreign hands.
He rejected the thinking behind the pledge as well. “Trillions of dollars have been given to charity in the past 50 years,” he said in 2010. “They don’t solve anything.” His alternative was blunter still: “The only way to fight poverty is with employment.”
He made a counter-offer at the same time. He told CNBC he had said to Gates and the others that for every dollar they put into Mexico, his foundation would put in another.
They worked together anyway
On 13 February 2013 the two appeared together at a maize and wheat research centre in Texcoco, an hour east of Mexico City, alongside the governor of the State of Mexico and the federal agriculture minister. Their foundations were funding crop research, and the pictures of the two of them shaking hands went out worldwide.
Gates wrote about the trip on his blog that week, calling Slim “a very interesting guy” and comparing him to Warren Buffett for his eye for undervalued investments. Two months later, at a vaccine summit in Abu Dhabi, Slim pledged $100m towards Gates’ campaign to wipe out polio.
What Slim built instead
In 1997, at 57, Slim had open heart surgery. Afterwards he split the businesses between his three sons. Carlos Slim Domit took telecoms and now chairs the boards of Amรฉrica Mรณvil, Grupo Carso, Telmex and Sanborns. Marco Antonio runs the bank, Inbursa. Patrick took the industrial and retail side. His three daughters work across the family’s cultural and charitable programmes, and Soumaya directs the Mexico City museum named after her mother.
Slim holds the title of honorary chairman. He still fronts the annual press conference, and in May this year he announced $5bn of investment across the group.
The holding company carries both their names. Grupo Carso comes from Carlos and Soumaya, his wife, who died in 1999.
Slim has not softened, and the pledge is losing members
His position has not moved in sixteen years. At that 2024 press conference he went after the model directly. “I’ve already criticised them, the ones who are going to donate 50 percent,” he said. “What they should be donating is their work, their commitment to solving society’s problems, not making donations.” Foundations, he added, spend too much of the money on themselves.
Meanwhile the initiative he turned down is struggling to hold on to the people who signed it. According to New York Times reporting this year, 113 families joined in the pledge’s first five years. Four joined in the whole of 2024. The Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong took his name off in 2024. Peter Thiel, who never signed, has been privately urging around a dozen signatories to withdraw, Elon Musk among them. Buffett went public in March to defend it.
Neither man has been proved right
Sixteen years after he refused to sign, Slim is richer than the man who asked him, and the pledge is shedding members. The vindication is less clean than it looks.
The pledge is not losing people because anyone demonstrated that employment beats charity. Thiel’s campaign against it has nothing to do with the argument Slim made in 2011, and Slim has not claimed any credit for it. He is winning on a scoreboard that was never measuring the thing he said he was right about.
His position has also always been the comfortable one to hold. Keeping the companies, keeping control of them and calling that the responsible choice costs him nothing. Gates has committed to spending down a fortune that nobody could force him to spend, and is being told by people like Thiel that he is a fool for it.
Gates has 19 years on the clock and intends to leave his three children a fraction of a percent between them. Slim has no clock. His sons already run the companies, his shares will pass to his six children as shareholdings rather than cash, and he has told reporters that Telmex is off the table for good.
