On November 13, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled against billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego’s challenge to an unpaid tax bill of nearly $3 billion. It was another victory in the ruling left-wing Morena party’s crackdown against corporate tax evasion, which began under former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and continues under his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum. The Mexican government’s willingness to crack down on billionaires like Salinas has been a factor in Morena’s enduring popularity, in stark contrast to the continued sway of oligarchs north of the border. 

Salinas, who recently promoted the so-called Gen-Z protests against the government, has been described as the “Mexican Elon Musk” for his right-wing libertarian views. The day of the protests, Salinas—who is reportedly planning a presidential run—took to X to declare: “What Mexico needs is a tiny government without so many regulations nor absurd taxes to maintain the lives of government parasites.” 

But for all of his talk of personal responsibility, Mexico’s Elon Musk—not unlike his US counterpart—owes much of his success to government patronage. A scion of the Mexican elite, he inherited the retail and financial conglomerate Grupo Elektra from his father in 1987. In 1993, amid a massive campaign of privatization, he leveraged a $29.8 million loan from the president’s brother for the purchase of state-owned broadcaster Imevisión. The acquisition later became the country’s second largest channel, TV Azteca, making the magnate one of Mexico’s first billionaires. 

Salinas went on to cultivate close ties with consecutive administrations of the centrist PRI and conservative PAN parties, and benefited handsomely from state-sponsored tax evasion. For decades, the Mexican government allowed the country’s largest firms, including foreign multinationals, to accumulate gargantuan sums in unpaid taxes. On paper, companies like Walmart owed millions to Mexico’s internal revenue service (SAT) but were allowed to forgo payments as well as late fees via a combination of legal injunctions and weak enforcement. Salinas’s Grupo Elektra was one of the worst offenders, with unpaid taxes going as far back as 2008. 

In 2018, López Obrador won the presidency in a landslide, promising to end the privileges of the so-called “mafia of power” that dominated Mexico—both public and private elites who had long survived off the largesse of the Mexican state. Surprisingly for a left-wing president, AMLO took an axe to waste across a host of public and state-funded institutions, slashing public sector salaries and imposing cuts on academia, government agencies, and the NGO complex, all under the mantra of “republican austerity.” By 2019, businesses were terrified that they were next on the chopping block after congress codified tax evasion as a national security threat comparable with drug trafficking. One by one, the owners of Mexico’s most powerful companies fell in line—save for the flamboyant Salinas.

The irony is that the libertarian magnate saw the writing on the wall well before Lopez Obrador assumed the presidency, and for a time tried to cultivate good relations with him. In 2006, TV Azteca conferred AMLO’s coalition a daily show at a notable discount and later provided favorable coverage to Morena after its founding. The patronage served as an insurance policy if and when the populist upstart finally bested his establishment opponents. 

Salinas was also initially part of AMLO’s council of business advisors alongside Mexico’s two other wealthiest men—Carlos Slim and German Larrea. The trio and big business more broadly extracted notable concessions from the president, including a commitment not to raise income taxes. Slim and Larrea also received public contracts for the construction of infrastructure projects and assisted the government’s partial renationalization of the energy sector. Meanwhile, Salinas’ Banco Azteca became a pillar of Morena’s social programs in poor neighborhoods. 

In exchange, the country’s oligarchy tolerated historic hikes to the minimum wage, the codification of labor rights, and agreed to settle tax debts. While Slim and Larrea quickly paid their dues, including retroactive late fees, Salinas refused. A protracted legal battle followed. For years, he and AMLO maintained they were open to an agreement, but over time, the two men fell out. By the end, Salinas became a fixture of AMLO’s daily press conferences, known as the mañaneras. In 2024, López Obrador ordered the National Guard to seize one of Salinas’ golf courses in Huatulco, Oaxaca. “It’s not personal,” AMLO said, explaining that a concession granted by a former president on public land had expired.

When Sheinbaum assumed the presidency, Salinas harbored hope that AMLO’s successor would be more cooperative. Instead, the new president revoked Salinas’s protections from debt collection abroad; in October, the magnate posted a $200 million bond after New York’s Supreme Court threatened to arrest him over debts owed to AT&T. 

For years, Salinas delayed his legal case via a litany of injunctions and good relations with the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Then, in June, Mexico replaced the entirety of the court with elected justices, who finally ruled against the magnate’s debts. Salinas, naturally, has disputed the legitimacy of the decision. And while critics are right to point to flaws in Mexico’s judicial elections, it’s hard to take Salinas’ claims of persecution seriously considering the age and extent of his debts.  

“He’s called for a Bukele-style crackdown.”

For all the scorn the party has earned from foreign and domestic finance, Morena’s rule has seen corporate profits as well as the net worth of Mexican billionaires double, in part because of increased consumer demand due to wage hikes. Having started AMLO’s term as the country’s third richest man, Salinas is a notable exception to this shared prosperity, losing around half of his net worth in recent years. In addition to his legal woes, the billionaire has made imprudent investments in bitcoin.

In preparation for a likely presidential run in 2030, Salinas held an October birthday rally in the Mexico City Arena. The question raised by the “Gen-Z” protests is whether he will be able to fuse his resentment against the current regime with more broadly felt discontent. By far his strongest issue is security, where he’s called for a Bukele-style crackdown. While Sheinbaum has taken a tougher stance against drug trafficking than her predecessor, cartel violence will likely remain the administration’s weak point. 

But Salinas’ libertarianism is a hard sell in Mexico at a time when public opinion has moved against the sort of privatizations that made him rich in the first place. The magnate’s deficit hawkery also has little appeal given Mexico’s fiscal prudence under Morena, whose program of republican austerity has amounted to a more successful, left-wing version of DOGE. 

Morena’s hard-headed populism, which has targeted both government bureaucracy and unchecked billionaires, offers lessons for would-be populist upstarts stateside. While organized crime comparable to Mexico’s cartels is a distant memory in the United States, money laundering of narco profits in banking and real estate operates with relative impunity. For decades, human trafficking and the mass exploitation of illegal labor was rampant, particularly under the Biden administration; in Trump’s second term, while the former has markedly improved, the latter persists. Meanwhile, legalized bribery via the Citizens United and Snyder rulings has metastasized under Trump as special interests offer donations in exchange for tariff exemptions and pardons—including for drug traffickers. 

A future pro-worker US administration could opt to ban congressional stock trading, recriminalize bribery, and raise the minimum wage for the first time since 2007. In exchange for preserving tax loopholes or maintaining current tax rates, businesses could be made to accept national and mandatory E-Verify under pain of severe penalties. Such a government could imitate AMLO and Sheinbaum’s use of the mañaneras to publicly flagellate firms that subject illegal labor to slave-like conditions and undercut native workers. 

The rank corruption of Mexico’s “mafia of power” gifted Morena low-hanging political fruit. The same is true for any American political entrepreneur willing to learn from the party’s achievements.