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Carlos Slim Helú

The Story of Carlos Slim Helú: From Immigrant to Billionaire

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What if the largest nation-building businesses were all operated by a single company? You wouldn’t have to enrich any of your competitors to purchase practically anything. That is the scenario in Mexico, home to Carlos Slim Helú, one of the richest individuals on earth.

Carlos Slim Helú
Image Source: vanitystardom.com

His path to wealth, estimated to be worth 83.3 billion USD by the end of July 2022 by Forbes, is an excellent example of both business savvy and political ties.

Also Read: Ray Dalio: How He Built a Multi-Billion Dollar Hedge Fund Empire

Early Years

Carlos Slim Helú was born on 28th January 1940, in Mexico. His parents, Lebanese-born Maronite Catholics Julián Slim Haddad & Linda Hel Atta, raised him.

Julian Slim seemed a natural in a community that valued trade; he started a dry products shop in 1911 that quickly expanded to carry over $100,000 of products. Throughout the 1910–1917 Mexican Revolution, he used the earnings from the shop to acquire prestigious property for a meager sum in Mexico City. Carlos had a keen interest in the company of his dad at an early age.

When Carlos was 13 years old, his father passed away. He kept working for his late father’s business. Slim had a knack for economics while he was attending college for civil engineering and pursued several economics classes in Chile after earning his degree in 1961.

At the beginning of the 1980s, peso turmoil and a sharp decrease in oil prices presented him with one of his greatest opportunities. Slim purchased several businesses at low valuations as cash fled the nation.

Achievements

Numerous additional businesses that Slim is involved with include Grupo Carso SAB, his international conglomerate. Slim’s wealth is primarily derived from the telecoms industry. América Movil, formerly known as Teléfonos de Mexico or Telmex, is owned by Slim.

The previous national telephone monopoly, Telmex, was comparable to AT&T Inc. in the United States. Through Grupo Carso, Slim served as one of the early investors in the 1990s when authorities privatized the business together with Southwestern Bell Corporation & France Télécom.

The cost was 1.8 billion USD, with Grupo Carso contributing half of that sum in exchange for a 20 percent interest. Carlos Slim gained control of Telmex while leading Grupo Carso.

By 2012, Slim’s cell phone business América Movil had acquired Telmex and turned it into a confidentially controlled subsidiary. Through its subsidiary Telcel, América Movil controls more than 80 percent of the landlines and 70 percent of the cell phone connections in Mexico.

Also Read: Gianluigi Aponte Success Story: From Sailor to Shipping Magnate

Following the implementation of fresh anti-monopoly legislation in Mexico, the corporation is now willing to dispose of assets to reduce its share of the market to under 50 percent.

Across its several divisions, América Movil serves more than simply Mexico. The most well-known company in the US is TracFone, an affordable mobile phone provider that Verizon purchased in 2021. The business owns a significant portion of Telekom Austria in Austria. Almost all of Latin America is a part of Slim’s telecommunications business.

Slim’s approach has been to acquire occasionally struggling businesses and attempt to remake them. The benefit of that strategy is that it only requires an understanding of what is underestimated as well as what isn’t, rather than necessarily requiring specific expertise in any certain area.

Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio: How He Built a Multi-Billion Dollar Hedge Fund Empire

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The greatest hedge fund worldwide, Bridgewater Associates, which has had about 130 billion USD in the capital since about June 2022, was founded by Ray Dalio.

Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater in 1975 from his apartment in Manhattan after getting an MBA from Harvard Business School and establishing his business on Wall Street.

Ray Dalio
Image Source: bloomberg.com

Bridgewater’s development into the financial giant that it is today was greatly aided by Dalio’s tactics and beliefs, which were occasionally the target of criticism but were also greatly imitated by other CEOs and businesses in the financial services industry and everywhere else.

Also Read: Gianluigi Aponte Success Story: From Sailor to Shipping Magnate

His philosophical foundation is the idea that cause-and-effect connections are essential for comprehending complex reality. As per Dalio, understanding how these connections have influenced the past might help us make the best decisions today and unleash future prosperity.

In the financial industry, Dalio’s ideas and Bridgewater’s traditions of “idea meritocracy” as well as “radical transparency” have had a significant impact.

Ray Dalio, who founded Bridgewater, believed that cause-and-effect links provided the means to forecast every aspect of an organization. He focused on the quantity of livestock and the quantity of meat that would be sold, in addition to how much livestock would eat and the resulting amount of food, such as maize and soy, that would be eaten.

Other experts would have missed Dalio and Bridgewater’s ability to estimate the timing and volume of products that will be available using regression analysis of weather predictions and yield.

His principles include:

• It’s crucial to continuously learn from life’s challenges, adjust to new realities, and improve one’s capacity for handling reality.

• Even the most intricate realities are the consequence of cause-and-effect interactions, so the world and the markets function like a piece of machinery.

• History frequently mimics itself. Although there might be variances, properly examining the cause-and-effect connections that underlie historical happenings enables comprehension of current processes and the creation of response tactics.

• Adopting specific guidelines, stress-testing them, and adhering to them is essential for success.

• Another essential component of accomplishing goals is cooperating with others and creating a supportive group culture.

Also Read: How Swiss Billionaire Hansjörg Wyss Built His Empire

• Even more crucial than utilizing knowledge is addressing gaps in knowledge.

His investment philosophies have significantly impacted the financial industry and beyond. He was named one of Time magazine’s most important persons in the world in 2012, and he has committed to giving away half of his lifetime income to charity.

Gianluigi Aponte

Gianluigi Aponte Success Story: From Sailor to Shipping Magnate

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Italian business magnate Gianluigi Aponte is the founder, owner, and chairman of the Mediterranean Shipping Company.

About Mediterranean Shipping Company.

Gianluigi Aponte established the international shipping company Mediterranean Shipping Company S.A. in Italy in 1970; its head office has been in Switzerland since 1978. The Aponte family owns the privately held business.

Gianluigi Aponte
Image Source: gcaptain.com

The business is active in all significant ports around the globe. With a 4,631,403 twenty-foot equivalent unit intake capacity as of 2023, MSC runs 721 container vessels.

Success Story

For a while, Aponte worked in finance, but he yearned to get back into the maritime business. In 1970, he founded the Mediterranean Shipping Company after raising $280,000 to purchase the German freighter, Patricia. A year later, he launched a second freight ship, Rafaela, named after his wife.

Also Read: How Swiss Billionaire Hansjörg Wyss Built His Empire

By the 1980s, Aponte’s fleet, which primarily operated between Europe and Africa, had grown to 20 cargo ships, which the billionaire sold to transition into container shipping. After purchasing the cruise fleet of his mentor Achille Lauro in 1987, originally operating as Starlauro, he expanded into the cruise line business.

In 1995, the business adopted the MSC Cruises name. Achille Lauro, a passenger ship that was seized by PLF members off the coast of Egypt in 1985 and later caught fire and sank off the coast of Somalia in the Indian Ocean in 1994, was one of the company’s first ships.

The MSC Opera, a ship from the Lirica class that launched the business’s investment in advanced ships, was one of the first such vessels. With the launch of a €5.5 billion funding strategy to create the most cutting-edge cruise fleet in the world, MSC Cruises established itself as a significant player in the global cruise sector during the early 2000s.

In 2014, a new, massive investment project was started, with plans to build new boats as well as refurbish the original Lirica vessels. This expenditure is anticipated to cost $11.6 million between 2014 and 2026, and an even larger Meraviglia fueled by LNG and able to accommodate 6,334 guests is on the horizon.

As a result of its exceptional standards for environmental preservation, health, and safety, MSC Cruises already holds the distinction of becoming the first cruise line in the world to receive the coveted “6 Golden Pearls.”

Gianluigi Aponte shared an award for “Neapolitan Excellence in the World” with Fabio Cannavaro, Ambra Vallo, and other recipients in 2009 from then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.

Also Read: The Rise of Ivan Glasenberg: Mining Magnate’s Success Story

He received the Cruise International Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 in honor of his extensive work in the sector. In October 2013, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano bestowed upon him the Order of Merit for Labor title as well as Containerisation International’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Aponte family has been listed frequently in the Lloyd’s List of Top 100 Most Influential People in the Shipping Industry, with positions 10 in 2014 and 16 in 2018.

Hansjörg Wyss

How Swiss Billionaire Hansjörg Wyss Built His Empire

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Johann Georg Wyss, also known as Hansjörg Wyss, is a Swiss billionaire industrialist who supports political liberalism and environmental initiatives in the United States. He founded Synthes Holding AG and served as its first president and chairman.

His Wyss Foundation has assets worth more than $2 billion. According to Forbes, Hansjörg Wyss had an estimated net worth of over $5.1 billion as of March 2022. He is presently Chelsea’s co-owner in the Premier League.

Hansjörg Wyss
Image Source: news.harvard.edu

Early Life

Hansjörg Wysswas born in 1935 in Bern, Switzerland. His mother was a stay-at-home mom, and his father marketed mechanical calculators. He was raised with his two sisters in an apartment. Wyss graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich with a master’s degree in civil and structural engineering in 1959.

Also Read: The Rise of Ivan Glasenberg: Mining Magnate’s Success Story

He later graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA in 1965. Wyss spent several years working for a variety of organizations, including Monsanto Europe. He had a side business selling aircraft, and it was through this that he encountered a founding member of the Synthes company, which produces precise medical equipment and joined them in the 1970s.

Success Story

In 1977, Wyss established and assumed leadership of Synthes USA, the American subsidiary of the Swiss-based Synthes, a maker of medical devices that includes internal screws and plates for broken bones. After meeting the AO Foundation’s creator, Martin Allgoewer, and securing approval to market the group’s products in the Americas, he established the business.

In 2012, Wyss sold the business to Johnson & Johnson for $19.7 billion. He got 97.4 million Johnson & Johnson shares and $3.2 billion in cash, according to Bloomberg. Wyss is “among the most philanthropic people in the world,” according to Forbes. Businessweek calculated that Wyss personally gave roughly $277 million in donations between 2004 and 2008.

His charitable contributions grew after the 2012 sale of Synthes. In 2013, he pledged to donate the bulk of his wealth by signing The Giving Pledge. His charitable organizations have assets worth close to $2 billion.

His efforts resulted in the founding of the Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in 2009, as well as the Wyss Foundation, which works to protect the ecosystem. Working closely with regional allies, the Wyss Foundation has already contributed USD 450 million and made it possible to conserve 16 million hectares across the globe in just 20 years.

Also Read: Guillaume Pousaz: From Small Village to Billion-Dollar Empire

Hansjörg Wyss has also contributed to a plethora of projects that support fresh approaches to global problems in the areas of art, medicine, conservation, and humanitarian causes.

He is a part of the group that established Campus Biotech, a center of expertise for biotechnology and the life sciences in Switzerland. Additionally, he helped his buddy Ernst Beyler establish the Fondation Beyeler, which he presided over.

Kevin O’Leary

Kevin O’Leary: Success Story of Dyslexic Kid becoming Billionaire

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Kevin O’Leary, also known as “Mr. Wonderful,” is a Canadian entrepreneur, businessman, and television personality. O’Leary was a co-founder of SoftKey Software Products, a tech business that offered software for family entertainment and education. 

Kevin O'Leary
Image Source: techstory.in

Early Life

In 1954, Kevin O’Leary was born into a middle-class household. His mother was a skilled investor. Most of Kevin’s business insight comes from his mother. She gave him important financial and economic lessons at a young age. These ideas were Kevin’s guiding principles and the cornerstones on which he eventually construct his empire.

Kevin O’Leary experienced additional difficulties in school when he was growing up due to dyslexia. When O’Leary was a student at St. George’s School, his dyslexia started to hinder his academic performance. He had trouble reading and doing simple addition and multiplication problems.

He had to use supplemental tools to keep up with the learning content because his teachers did not assist him as they were unaware of his dyslexia. While pursuing MBA, O’Leary interned for Nabisco. O’Leary started a short-lived stint as a TV producer after leaving Nabisco. He co-founded Special Event Television(SET) with two of his fellow MBA classmates.

SET produced original sports programs as a freelance television production firm. With small television programs, soccer movies, sports documentaries, and quick intermission ads for nearby professional hockey games, the company had only little success. Later, for $25,000, one of the partners bought out Kevin’s portion of the business.

Success Story

In 1986, O’Leary established Softkey in a Toronto basement with partners Gary Babcock and John Freeman.SoftKey made hostile takeover approaches to buy competing businesses in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Compton’s New Media, The Learning Company, and Broderbund. Later, SoftKey changed its name to The Learning Company.

Softkey’s well-known position in the software sector finally aided “Mr. Wonderful” in becoming a millionaire. In 1999, Mattel recognized the software company’s absolute supremacy in the market and decided to acquire Softkey for an astounding $4.2 billion. 

In 2003 he joined “StorageNow Holdings,” a company that builds climate-controlled storage facilities, as a Director and co-investor. In 2007, the company was acquired by InStorage REIT for a staggering $110 million. O’Leary sold his shares in the company, which had a starting value of $500,000, for close to $4.5 million.

After experiencing incredible success at his software firm, Kevin began appearing on television. He soon established himself as a popular host and personality on a variety of programs, including CBC’s Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank.

Later he took control of his capital from his unreliable money managers and established his own mutual fund business, O’Leary Funds. Since then, Kevin has established O’Leary Fine Wines and a best-selling financial literacy book series.

In 2014, Kevin established the O’Leary Financial Group, a collection of companies and products that adhere to his core values of transparency, simplicity, convenience, and, excellent value.

Kevin O’Leary is a passionate supporter of environmental rights and makes an effort to invest in companies that share his views. He even co-hosts Project Earth on the Discovery Channel, a program dedicated to combating global warming. O’Leary also ran for the position of Canadian Conservative Party leader in 2017. Despite being in the lead, he withdrew one month prior to the election in April.

Ken Langone

Ken Langone: The Journey of a Plumber’s Son to Become a Billionaire

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Ken Langone is a multibillionaire American businessman, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is well known for arranging to fund The Home Depot’s founders.

Ken Langone
Image Source: cnbc.com

The Home Depot sells tools, building materials, and other services and is the biggest home improvement business in the USA. In 1978, Ken Langone made an initial investment in Home Depot and joined Arthur Blank and Bernard Marcus as cofounders.

Early Life

Ken Langone was born to working-class Italian Americans in New York. His mother worked in a café and his father worked as a plumber. His family has been believed to possess “a lot of love, but not a lot of money.” Being raised in a household where everyone lived paycheck to paycheck, Ken learned the worth of a dollar.

When he was old enough just to support his family, he started doing odd jobs. His first job as a young lad was selling newspapers. He performed a range of duties to help his family’s financial situation.

He performed numerous jobs including digging trenches for the road while working in construction. His family adopted a work-intensive lifestyle, but this young child understood that better and bigger things lay ahead for him.

Success Story

Early in the 1960s, Ken began working his first white-collar job for a Wall Street financial services company. He was a big success and advanced quickly in the corporate world. Ken was one of Ross Perot’s favorite people. In 1968, Ken was given responsibility for the IPO of Electronic Data Systems. To be his boss, Ken started the venture capital firm Invented in 1974.

Ken Langone and Bernie Marcus had brunch together in 1978. However, this encounter was not only about bacon and eggs. Bernie complained to Ken about how terribly top executives had mistreated him after he had recently lost his job at the home improvement chain, Handy Dan.

With the help of another co-founder, Arthur Blank, Ken and Bernie started formulating ideas for a warehouse-sized store filled with discounted products. The idea was to create a place where the typical customer could purchase everything required to turn their house into a home.

The initial two Home Depot stores opened their doors in 1979 after Ken was able to raise the necessary funding to launch the company. Three years later, Home Depot decided to go public at a $12 per share price. In 2021, Home Depot generated a revenue of over $151 billion.

Ken Langone had no desire to serve as a silent partner. He put forth a lot of effort after he co-founded Home Depot to raise money and build stores. He desired to treat each employee well because he was from a lower social status. According to Ken, one of the biggest issues in the United States is income inequality.

He doesn’t necessarily support a mandated minimum salary by the government, but he is aware that individuals cannot live on $20,000 per year. He always pays his employees more than the minimum wage.

The success story of Ken Lagone shows that anyone may prosper in a capitalist society. You don’t need to have any special ties or to have had a golden childhood. If you have the right drive, viewpoint, and ideas, you can achieve the capitalist dream while assisting others in doing the same.