way of doing philanthropy.
And so, standing next to his bookshelves, his blue tie loosened and his sky-blue shirt monogrammed with his initials, one of the richest men in the world starts reading a poem.
All you have shall someday be given;
Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors’.
You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”
The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.
They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.
Khalil Gibran, known in Mexico as Gibran Khalil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant in America who wrote in English and published The Prophet in 1923, is one of Slim’s favorite authors. Others on his list are contemporary Mexicans such as Ángeles Mastretta and Carlos Fuentes, who fictionalized part of his relationship with Slim in La voluntad y la fortuna (Destiny and Desire), one of his last books. Slim and Fuentes used to meet frequently before the writer died. Slim also befriended the late Colombian Nobel-Prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez.
Other high-profile acquaintances include American ex-president Bill Clinton, scientist Stephen Hawking, historian Hugh Thomas, futurologist Alvin Toffler, strategist Nicholas Negroponte and the Spanish socialist ex-president Felipe González, who is also his friend. All of them have visited the billionaire’s house in Lomas de Chapultepec, some of them on a Sunday or Monday night, which is when Slim’s children—Marco Antonio, Patrick, Soumaya, Vanessa and Johanna—meet for dinner and chat about different topics with international personalities of science, literature and politics. Since 2002, Fundación Telmex has organized an international symposium in Mexico City. Slim invites some of the people he knows or admires to deliver a keynote speech that only the young interns and specific staff from his companies have access to. The list of speakers is as long as it is diverse, and reveals the kind of convening power Slim possesses, as well as some of his interests and passions. In 2002, for example, the legendary football star Pelé was a guest, while in 2003 guests included Alvin Toffler, ex-president Bill Clinton and basketball player Earvin “Magic” Johnson. In 2004, guests were Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, and from the United States, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. In 2005, actor Goldie Hawn and Argentinian ex-football player Jorge Valdano were guests, while in 2006, a year of troubled presidential elections in Mexico, the symposium did not take place.
In 2007 the international catwalk of Slim’s acquaintances was set in motion once more and guests included singer Gloria Estefan, athlete Carl Lewis, and Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard. In 2008, actor and activist Jane Fonda was invited, and, also from the United States, Colin Powell, former secretary of state. Between 2009 and 2013, the list of guests included former president of Chile Ricardo Lagos, tennis player Anna Kournikova, actor Forest Whitaker, cofounder of Twitter Biz Stone, journalist Larry King, filmmaker James Cameron, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, president of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, Brazilian former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, trainer Joséph Guardiola, former British prime minister Tony Blair, writer Deepak Chopra, swimmer Michael Phelps, cofounder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, actor Al Pacino, founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, actor Antonio Banderas, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
This list of characters is as varied and contradictory as the image of Slim tends to be. As a man who says he is politically neither on the left nor the right, it would seem that his political geometry is determined solely by capital.
We return to the tour of his library.
“These here are books I’ve read, lots are about business, but I have many more books at home,” Slim clarifies as we walk past one of his bookshelves.
“And what else do you read?”
“Lots of things.”
“Do you read economic theory?”
“No, I rarely read theory. I don’t like it.”
“So you’re an omnivore?”
“Look, these here are art books.”
The businessman who built one of Mexico’s biggest museums, which carries the name of his late wife Soumaya, points at the shelf holding mostly gifted volumes that he has decided to keep in his library, a few of the hundreds that arrive each year and that pile up, along with other kinds of gifts, in a room next door that functions as a customs office or sorting heap.
We continue walking and Slim remembers something. From between the book Historia de la deuda exterior de México (History of Mexico’s Foreign Debt), written by Jan Bazant and published by El Colegio de México in 1968, and the biography Hammer, by Armand Hammer and Neil Lyndon, he picks out an old volume entitled Geometría analítica y cálculo infinitesimal (Analytic Geometry and Calculus), by F. Woods and F. H. Bailey (UTEHA, 1979).
“This is my book from second year in college,” he says, proudly.
Then appears La Reina del Sur (The Queen of the South), a novel by Arturo Pérez Reverte about a woman from Sinaloa involved in international drug trafficking. Slim explains:
“This is out of place. There are others here I haven’t read, either… Look, this one’s very good. Look at what a lovely title it has.” I read on the cover Reinas, mujeres y diosas. Mágicos destinos (Queens, Women and Goddesses: Magical Destinies), while Slim rips off the plastic wrapping that still covers it.
“We published it at Sanborns and the cover is a painting from the museum,” he says, and continues searching. “The Peter Principle, this is a great one.” He shows me the book, whose author is famous in the business world because of his adage: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of their incompetence. The cream rises till it sours.”
In this same section there is a beautifully illustrated book about modern warfare, which Slim says he just read and that I should also read to my son. There is a biography of the Kennedys and the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. He asks me if I have read it. When I say I haven’t, he says I should and gives it to me. I take it and eye the subtitle on the cover, not wondering whether it might be a hint: “Why some people succeed and others don’t.”
Slim is not only a voracious reader, but also one of the biggest booksellers in Mexico. Sanborns, his chain of about 200 restaurants and department stores, includes the country’s biggest network of bookshops, which implies that for authors and publishing houses it is vital to establish a commercial relationship with the company, currently headed up by Patrick, the youngest of his sons.
“If your book is not in Sanborns, it does not exist. It’s that simple,” said an experienced publisher I have worked with a number of times. For years there have been rumors that books are censored if Slim or his inner circle find them uncomfortable. But Slim says this is untrue and cites an example: Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, MIT and Harvard professors respectively, wrote Why Nations Fail, in which they include a small section about the owner of Telmex. “Slim has made his millions in the Mexican economy in large part thanks to his political connections. When he has ventured into the United States, he has not been successful.” This section made Slim consider the possibility of undertaking legal proceedings to force a public retraction from these professors, who come from two of the most prestigious
