with these books?”
“Do you mean what will my children do with them when I die?”
“Well, you could also do something before then.”
“Do you mean am I going to donate my collection? Nope.”
“Why not give it to the reading library at UNAM?”
“No, we have studies centers.”
“Or the University of Austin. For example, the politician Bill Richardson just donated his library to them.”
“But in the United States, they buy them.”
“True, Gabriel García Márquez’s library was bought there for $2 million.”
“Twelve million?”
“No, $2 million.”
“No, that’s too cheap.”
“And Bill’s?”
“I think he donated it.”
For a brief moment Slim remains silent, as if thinking about what will happen to his books in the future.
But he doesn’t speak further on it.
“I’ve never worn glasses. I’ve been reading with my left eye since I was young.”
“And why did you never get a laser operation?”
“In those days there were no operations.”
“And now?”
“Why would I get operated if I read fine with my left eye?”
“I got the operation a year ago and it changed my life.”
“Sure, but in ten years you’ll be back to where you were.”
“But I will have had ten years of not wearing glasses.”
“Yes, but you’re going to live fifty more. You’ll have a tough time, kid, believe me… No, my eyesight is fine, I can read fine. Let’s see, look, get me something in fine print.”
Holding up some financial documents in fine print, the magnate starts reading out loud to perfection.
I asked two successful businessmen in their thirties, separately, whether they thought it was interesting to know what books Slim has in his library. Despite the generational gap and the fact that they are critical of the billionaire’s dominant role in the business world, both said yes. After I’d mentioned some of the titles, one of them told me he’d started to look for them to read them soon, while the other one was amazed because he didn’t know most of them, despite being an avid reader of books about finance and business strategies. The titles I found in Slim’s library, where the most repeated word was “money,” included Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, by John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin, 1975); The Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power and Profits, by Sarah Barlett (Warner Books, 1991); Paper Money, by Adam Smith (Dell, 1982), Super-Money, by Adam Smith (Random House, 1972), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin, 2009), The Warren Buffett Way: Investment Strategies of the World’s Greatest Investor, by Robert G. Hagstrom (Wiley, 1997), a Spanish edition of The Peter Prescription: How to Make Things Go Right, by Laurence J. Peter (Plaza & Janés, 1991), a Spanish edition of Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation From Stifling People and Strangling Profits, by Robert Townsend (Grijalbo, 1970), and The Money Lords: The Great Finance Capitalists, 1925–1950, by Mathew Joséphson (Weybright and Talley, 1972).
Of all the titles in this section, the one that intrigued me most was a Spanish edition of Winning Through Intimidation, by Robert J. Ringer (V Siglos, 1974), first published in English in 1973. My book dealer told me it would be difficult to find, but he would help me find it for a thousand pesos. I asked the same bookseller how much he thought he could get for a 1960s edition of a book by Getty underlined by Slim; he replied that it would be worth between 50,000 and 100,000 pesos.
I also talked about the list of over 100 books that I identified in the library with Daniel Gershenson, a prominent independent activist and critic of Slim’s monopolistic practices. Gershenson, who lived a large part of his life in New York, was of the opinion that “his selection of titles is quite conventional; indistinguishable from that of any rich dude from Wall Street (a ‘master of the universe,’ as Tom Wolfe would call him), who might also be a baseball or basketball fan.”
Of the dozens of sports books that are also in Slim’s library, Gershenson pointed out that the billionaire had a biography of Ty Cobb, the Detroit Tigers’ player who was nicknamed the Peach of Georgia and considered by experts to be the best baseball player in history, even above the famous Babe Ruth: “Cobb was a cantankerous, confrontationally racist, and belligerent player in Major League Baseball, which was segregated until 1947, when Jackie Robinson—the first black player—was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Known for his violent tendencies and his spikes-up displays of cruelty in an era when those “character traits” were highly valued, Cobb was a man who, according to North American folklore, twisted the rules and grabbed undue advantages for the sake of achieving his goal: to win at all costs.
A “dirty” baseball player, but a winner. The ultimate accolade within gringo pragmatism.
Anyone can become a millionaire overnight out of sheer luck. But to reach the top of the list of the world’s billionaires takes half a lifetime of effort and, according to modern Western mythology, requires the profile of a generous, creative and audacious man. Bill Gates is seen as an IT genius, Warren Buffett as an infallible investor, George Soros as a rebellious and chic millionaire. Carlos Slim is known for being one of the richest men in the world in a country with 50 million poor. Perhaps this is why, rather than believing in the value of his work, his critics compare him to the Russian oligarchs, who multiply their fortunes through corruption and receive business advantages under the shadow of power. The Wall Street Journal attributes Slim’s fortune to his monopolistic practices. The magnate has denied this time and again, although in Mexico there is a very popular notion that without the help he received from the government he would never have reached the heights of the world’s richest.
During the May 1 Workers’ Day Parade, 1989—when the PRI regime still went to great lengths to create the display of thousands of workers parading down cities’ main streets—then-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, watching the event from the Palacio Nacional balcony, asked the director of the state-owned company Teléfonos de México (Telmex) to stop marching and come up to the balcony to watch the workers’ contingents together. A simple gesture like this, for the PRI, held the key to the future: the government was preparing to privatize the company. A year and a half later,
