This Was The Key To Gus Fring's Immense Success On Breaking Bad

Gus establishes his success in the season 4 episode "Salud," in which he, Jesse, and Mike (Jonathan Banks) visit Juaréz Cartel bigshot Don Eladio Vuente (Steven Bauer) — and under the guise of peace talks, poisons him and his capos with a bottle of poison tequila. This might seem like a suspiciously easy way to topple a powerful criminal organization, but when a Breaking Bad fan asked on Reddit whether he truly managed to bring down the whole cartel, user Universal-Gleam pointed out that Gus' plan was devastatingly effective.

"I would assume that Gus essentially destroyed the whole cartel due to assassinating Eladio and other high ranking members (including Juan Bolsa  [Javier Grajedja])," they wrote. "Is that to say that the whole cartel would disappear overnight? Unlikely, but it wouldn't be operational for very long without that leadership and would have no means of maintaining its power. Word would spread about Eladio's death and it would fall apart. Hector [Salamanca, played by Mark Margolis] was the last surviving high-ranking member after the assassination, but was obviously in no position to do much by himself. The resulting power vacuum would just leave the door open for Gus to increase his own empire freely, and any remaining Cartel operations would be easily broken down over a short time."

So, yeah. The poison tequila maneuver was all it took for Gus to destroy his enemies, and to become the single most powerful character on Breaking Bad. Of course, the only reason Gus' success doesn't last is specifically because he leaves the seemingly harmless Hector alive. This enables Walt to conspire with the old cartel member to equip his wheelchair with a bomb — which, in turn, proves to be the end of Gus.