Slim is $16 billion poorer but a lot more popular
MEXICO CITY— On June 15, 2015, the day before Donald Trump launched his presidential bid, Carlos Slim’s personal fortune stood at just under $67 billion.
Today, it’s about $51 billion.
No one on Earth has lost more during Mr. Trump’s rise — from a dollar and cents standpoint, at least — than the Mexican telecom magnate. His rank on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index has slipped to sixth after having once held the No. 1 spot. Some of the reasons behind his tumble, of course, have little to do with U.S. politics, but much of it comes down to this: Mr. Trump’s tough talk on Mexico has sunk the peso, dragging down the dollar-based value of Mr. Slim’s domestic assets in the process.
There’s another, entirely unexpected, element to the Slim saga, though. The very same forces that are shrinking his fortune are, oddly enough, also boosting his popularity at home — to the extent that he is now talked about wistfully as a candidate in next year’s presidential election. After Mr. Slim met with Mr. Trump in a December visit, Mexicans outraged by Mr. Trump’s vow to step up deportations and build a border wall at Mexico’s expense started to warm to the idea that the 77-year-old tycoon could be exactly what the country needs.
A poll by El Universal in January showed that Mr. Slim was considered the best-suited Mexican to face Mr. Trump, edging out populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the early frontrunner. His calls for the Mexican economy to look inward, as much as his vast fortune and defiance of Mr. Trump, have resonated with Mexicans. And while long reviled at home for his hard-ball business practices, Mr. Slim has become politically palatable as cell phone bills have fallen because of a price war and regulatory crackdown.
His candidacy may be a longshot — he told Bloomberg TV in December that he’d “never” run for office — but Mexicans are hopeful.
“Slim said he wasn’t interested,” said David Crow, a political analyst at Mexico City research center Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas. “Nobody quite believes him or wants to believe him. He out-Trumps Trump. He’s similar as a private sector guy, but he’s fabulously wealthy and far outpaces Trump in that regard.”