of us to have one, and old friends you can depend on. In that sense, it’s good to be able to serve in a way as an example, especially when it comes to a way of life. I think that anyone who enjoys any kind of privilege, whichever it is, has a duty and social responsibility…”
“But I think the admiration some people have towards you is not because of your family, but your huge accumulation of money. To many, that is a symbol of success.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think money is a symbol of success, because you can have a lot of money, and yet be miserable and alone. Someone said of a person: ‘He was so poor, so very poor, that all he had was money.’ I think that sums it up very well. Also, we need to make a distinction between money and business. It’s one thing to have X million or billion in the bank, or in cash, or in investments, or in whatever you like, and it’s another to have a business, where what you have is an important investment for society.”
Slim went on, now commenting on the difference he saw between the concepts of income and wealth. He characterized income as the fruit of wealth, while wealth should be managed in such a way that it bears fruit, so that it can be distributed among others. “It’s the fruit that should be distributed, not the wealth itself. Does that make sense?”
“I think so.”
“If you distribute all the shares of Pemex among Mexicans tomorrow, what would each Mexican do?” Slim’s example wasn’t accidental. Pemex (Mexican Petroleum) is the previously state-owned company that is currently entering a period of competition, since the government opened up the energy market to private investment. Slim’s is one of the companies that will participate.
Slim claims that if Pemex shares were distributed out among all Mexicans, most who received them would sell them immediately: “They’d sell them, because what you want is to have a better life for your family. So the important thing is for Pemex to be a very efficient, prudent company that creates more wealth, and for the fruit of the wealth that is being created to be partly reinvested and partly redistributed. Just as in private companies. When you create wealth, it’s about the wealth staying within society.”
In Slim’s view, the important thing is that wealth “generates employment, generates more wealth, generates services or important assets for society, and when there are shareholders, that they participate in the product and that the taxes remain, and that there is still an independent part of the company—I believe we as businesspeople have that obligation. Even if sometimes the business cooperates in some way to resolve important social projects.”
“That sounds interesting: in a time when there’s a love for easy money, for consumerism, you, one of the richest men in the world, have this vision, which seems contrary to what you represent to many people.”
“What matters is not that people possess wealth, but what they do with it and what kind of wealth it is. If what you have is a lot of money in cash or investments to amuse yourself and hang out, you turn into a kind of social parasite. That’s quite different to the situation of a businessman who is working on the development and structure of the company. So, taking Americans as an example, some of them [Warren Buffet and Bill Gates] are going to donate half of their capital. I say: OK, but why half? Why not 70 or 80 percent? It’s not so much the percentage that I might object to. My question is: Why don’t they give their time? Why not, instead of giving money, give time and commitment, so that together, with the money they have, they might solve some problems? All that money being donated to people is not functional, it doesn’t solve anything. Maybe it’s just to make themselves feel good or avoid feeling ashamed of having resources, of having wealth.”
In the same train of thought, the man who has accumulated a fortune equaling the GDP of several poor countries, concluded by telling me about his view of his own wealth: “I am not ashamed of what I have, although many are critical because they say I’m favored and this and that, but ask me whatever you like about that and I’ll answer.”
It’s understandable that a multimillionaire like Carlos Slim, who is so omnipresent in the life of Mexicans and Latin Americans, should be an object of over-the-top adulation and gratuitous praise. Opinion on him is divided between the indulgence of intellectuals, politicians and artists, who see him as a nationalist benefactor, and fierce attacks from ordinary citizens, who have no other choice than to be his customers because he owns the vast majority of the products and services they consume. Then they let off steam by telling jokes, such as the typical: “Baby, it doesn’t pay to argue on the phone for hours on end. Carlos Slim will make a tidy profit, though.” The reach of his power extends even to the realm of domestic arguments, and the only thing left to do is laugh.
But in the business world, one of the things that stands out about Slim is his ruthlessness. A very close associate of northern Mexican entrepreneur Lorenzo Zambrano, the late president of Cemex, told me that he and Slim were friends until the cement mogul decided to buy a small percentage of the telephone company Axtel, a Telmex competitor. Not only did this cause their personal relationship to cool, but Slim decided to invest in Cementos Moctezuma to compete against his former friend.
In 2010, on the centenary of the Mexican Revolution for greater social justice spearheaded by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, Slim celebrated his seventieth birthday accumulating so much money that he was seeing earnings averaging $2 million per hour—a fact that he downplays and explains away as a part of the period we live in:
“Now we are in a new era in which what matters most is combating poverty,” he says. “It used to be a moral and ethical problem: now it’s a financial problem. The great Chinese progress is bringing 20 or 30 million Chinese people out of poverty and marginalization every year. What China has done is fight poverty through capitalism. Everything is capitalism. People who talk about ‘savage capitalism’ are on the wrong track. Everything is capitalism. There is state capitalism or private capitalism. Or the capital within pension funds, which in the end is private. Capitalism is fundamental for investments to take place. A friend of mine used to say: ‘What is capital? It’s what you earn minus what you spend.’ That is what ends up forming our capital, and societies need to develop theirs, as China is doing.”
Slim is the highest representative of a concept that has not been well-researched but is a distinct reality: Latin American capitalism. It is in this region of the world where Slim has made the vast majority of his investments, although he has participated in other regional markets. In Spain, he has purchased real estate companies such as Realia de Valencia, the Oviedo football club or the Catalan construction company Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas. Austria and the Netherlands are other European countries where Slim has invested in the telecom sector.
But the expansion of Slim’s empire has by and large focused on a region of the world where the word “democracy” was first heard in earnest only a couple of decades ago, and where the law of the jungle sometimes prevails above all others.
Perhaps this is why I was not surprised to find out that Slim likes the stories of the Mongol emperor who ruled one of the largest empires in the history of humanity. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, a New York Times bestseller written by Jack Weatherford, is one of his favorite books, and he gifted me a copy after the following explanation:
“This book was interesting to me because Genghis Khan didn’t change the laws or the religions of the countries he occupied and he allowed free trade. He was savage when it came to conquering, but that was only when there was resistance, and in that he was no different than others.”
