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This story appears on the March 26, 2012 cover of Forbes.

Amid the threat of a Greek debt default and a recession in Europe, Carlos Slim Helú has some words of advice for political leaders: You’re doing it wrong. Slim, a Mexican entrepreneur who built a $69 billion fortune over nearly five decades

, thinks governments should stop trying to shrink budget deficits by shortchanging education. “I am very concerned about the world in general. I think the solutions that [political leaders] are looking at are not the right solutions,” he says. “They are not looking for a different way to solve the problem.”

The world’s richest person, it turns out, has time these days to ponder weightier issues than where he should invest next. Since 2004 Slim, who recently turned 72, has stepped down from the boards of three of his largest companies. He wants nothing more than to tell me, when we meet at his Mexico City office in late January, how he would solve the challenges facing Europe, the U.S. and Mexico. He likes to talk and likes to revisit his roots. We are sitting in heavy wooden chairs against the wall of books in his office when he gets up to grab a notebook he kept when he was 17. In it he had recorded his pay, 200 pesos a week, for working at his family’s company. Another entry noted that his mother had lent him 5,000 pesos to buy stocks.

Slim’s business empire is dominated by telecommunications but also includes finance, mining, real estate, infrastructure, retailing and heavy industry. His biggest success by far began with the $1.76 billion privatization of state-owned phone company Telmex in late 1990, led by his industrial conglomerate, Grupo Carso, alongside France Telecom and Southwestern Bell (now AT&T). Last year Telmex became part of América Móvil, a much expanded version of Telmex’s onetime cellular arm. Slim’s 43% stake in the pan-Latin American company clocks in at nearly $39 billion—more than half of his current net worth.

Given this history, it’s not surprising that privatization of state-owned assets is Slim’s first suggestion for struggling European economies. “Let’s talk about Spain. It has a lot of highways, and they are all free,” he says. “They should charge users and sell [the highways] to the private sector.” The government can use the money from selling the highways to avoid making big cuts in social programs, Slim advises.

Unemployment must also be addressed, he says. “The problem is that people have no jobs and no hope.” When I suggest that creating jobs takes time, he disagrees. “Some investments create a lot of jobs and other investments don’t.” His counsel: Invest in small and medium-size businesses, the engines of job creation, in labor-intensive industries such as tourism, health care, education and entertainment.

Turning to the U.S., Slim sees a pressing need for better regulation of the banking system, including the requirement that risky derivatives be carried on financial institutions’ books. He reminds me that he founded his financial group, Inbursa, as a brokerage in 1965. It has since expanded to include a bank and an insurance company, and sports a market capitalization of $14 billion. “We’ve had growth for 47 years. We have never lost money, even in the worst times of our country,” he boasts, noting that Inbursa never needed the government’s help. “We don’t look for size. We look for quality.” Take that, Citigroup.

Slim has put his sons, Carlos, Marco Antonio and Patrick, in charge of the industrial, finance and telecom companies he acquired or started. But he’s clearly still engaged. His son-in-law Arturo Elías Ayub, who directs strategic alliances, communications and institutional relations at Telmex but essentially serves as one of Slim’s right-hand men, tells me: “He decides what companies to buy, and I go and buy them.”

What’s next for the Slim conglomerate? For starters, more investment in his mining business, Minera Frisco, a company created in early 2011 when Slim spun off mining assets owned by Grupo Carso into its own Mexican-stock-exchange-traded entity. The decision was a smart one. Buoyed by high prices for precious metals, the market capitalization of Minera Frisco has soared to a recent $11.7 billion, 25% greater than that of its former parent, Grupo Carso.

“This company used to be medium-size, but it has the opportunity to grow and become a great mining company,” says Slim. Some would argue that Frisco is still medium-size—revenue for 2011 was $665 million. Investors are clearly expecting enormous growth.

As for telecom, América Móvil will invest around $9 billion annually over the next four years, improving its mobile and fixed-line networks throughout Latin America so it can transmit data more quickly. “We are going for faster speed,” says Slim. One area of focus, he adds, is connecting small and medium-size businesses to the Internet.

In Mexico many consider Slim a telecom monopolist because his companies have roughly 70% of the wireless market and an 80% share of landlines. Critics blame him for excessive prices, and a report released by the OECD in late January (after our interview) stated that the lack of competition in Mexico in telecommunications has led to high prices for consumers and businesses and has cost the Mexican economy $25 billion a year. Slim vehemently disagrees.

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