Asian emperor’s military strategies. He tells me, for example, how he destroyed a European army that was much more heavily armed than his own. He explains how Genghis Khan sent out some of his cavalry to threaten confrontation. Soon after, the cavalry pretended they were losing and began to retreat, drawing the enemy army forward, so that as their troops followed they started to lose their original formation, their cavalry separated from the infantry until they came to a place where the rest of Genghis Khan’s warriors waited in ambush, ready to kill the cavalry first, then the infantry. “Genghis Khan and his men managed to undermine the cohesion of occidental European armies; they knocked the bottom out of them by displacing and undoing their formations, tricking them into thinking they were already victorious, and taking advantage of their slow speed, because they were very heavily armed, very burdened. Genghis Khan was an extraordinary strategist.”
“Don’t you feel like there’s a similarity between you and Genghis Khan? You are the first Latin American businessman to become the world’s richest man, a position that had only previously been occupied by men from more developed countries. Do you feel like a modern Genghis Khan of sorts?” I ask.
“No, no. In an agrarian society there were wars, ransacking, conquests, slaves. Those were completely different paradigms, and he was a great conqueror who went far. Which is strange, because his own society was more primitive; that is, he was technologically behind those he conquered because he relied on the speed of the horse and on people’s courage, attacking with bow and arrow on horseback, with very astute and sometimes very aggressive battle and conquest strategies, and he sought to conquer also through negotiation. Those weretimes of war and he fought against armored armies, which he defeated despite them being technologically more advanced. Genghis Khan filled a very important stage in history, and his was the greatest conquest in the world, greater than that of Alexander the Great: Genghis Khan was the man who most transformed the world in the second millennium.”
Carlos Slim gets up from the table, where we are talking about the various influences he has had in his life, and pads over to the library, which takes up a section of his massive, carpeted office. He points out a few books.
“Look, this one about Baruch is interesting. And this one about Ling, who created a conglomerate and ended up bankrupting it, but it’s interesting to see how he did it. This one’s about Vesco, who ended up keeping a fund and then ran away to Cuba. It’s a great book because it describes the crisis of the ’70s. This one’s about Ford. Here’s the one about Don Pepe Iturriaga that I was telling you about the other day. This is a book about Getty, and this is the other one about Getty that I read when it was featured in Playboy magazine.”
The Mexican millionaire picks out a dog-eared paperback from the shelf: Así hice mi fortuna, by American oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty, first published in English as My Life and Fortunes in 1963. As Slim flicks through it, I notice the title of the first chapter: “How I made my first billion dollars,” and see that there are sentences and paragraphs underlined in black ink. It’s one of the few books in Spanish in this section of the library, where most books are in English, which Slim has been reading and speaking since he was young.
“Was Getty your main role model in the business world?”
“Not at all! Not my main role model. Baruch comes before him. And Rockefeller before Baruch,” he replies, and again turns to his books. “Look, this is the book about Rockefeller’s grandson, and the one about Chrysler is over there somewhere. You learn from all of them, and as I say, you learn from the good and the bad. In this book, for example, there’s a good analysis of Gates when he was starting out. The author gets it spot on. He says: ‘This guy’s not merely selling, he’s developing his business properly.’ This one, for example, is Paper Money.”
Slim reads mostly biographies, books on business, sports and finance statistics, as well as history. The books are tightly packed in a heaving, six-shelf bookcase that takes up the whole of one of the walls of his 900-plus-square-foot office, very near the house in which he’s lived for forty years. On display in his office are family photos, classical paintings, and a Spartan desk that Slim hardly ever uses, since he prefers to work at a table strewn with documents and sometimes diabetic chocolate wrappers. Although he is shortsighted in his right eye, he has perfect vision in his left, allowing him to read without glasses at his seventy-five years of age. He often interrupts our interviews to show me some of his books or documents kept in this library. If, as Borges said, we are not what we have written but what we have read, these interruptions from Slim are more revealing than some of the things he says, as they reflect part of the personality of a Mexican whose methods of wealth accumulation are questioned by many, and whose fortune, according to researcher José Merino’s calculations, could support the poorest 10 percent of Mexico’s households for almost fourteen years.
One of the books he pointed out the first time we met in his office was Mr. Baruch by Margaret L. Coit, published in English by Houghton Mifflin in 1957, the year Slim began his civil engineering studies at the UNAM. It’s the biography of Bernard Baruch, an American financier who became a millionaire in the early twentieth century by speculating on the sugar market, and who was nicknamed the Lone Wolf of Wall Street because he acted outside the financial institutions of the time. Baruch then unexpectedly left Wall Street for Washington, DC, to work in politics, and he served as a war adviser during the governments of Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman.
Another of the biographies Slim has read is Ling: The Rise, Fall, and Return of a Texas Titan, by Stanley H. Brown. Published by Atheneum in 1972, it tells the story of Jim Ling, an electrician from Oklahoma who, with only a high school education, became one of the great corporate speculators and the creator of Ling-Temco-Vought—one of the world’s largest conglomerates—until it went bankrupt with the 1970s crisis in the United States. There is also Vesco, by Robert A. Hutchison (Praeger, 1974), about Roberto Vesco, a fascinating and contradictory character, son of an Italian father and Yugoslavian mother, born in Detroit, who didn’t even finish high school—although at age thirty, thanks to his remarkable salesmanship, he became a millionaire, even if he did then scam a Swiss company for several million dollars and flee to the Caribbean: first to the Bahamas, then to Costa Rica, and eventually to Cuba, where he was warmly received by the revolutionary government until he likewise scammed a nephew of Fidel Castro and landed in a Havana jail.
The Crash of ’79, a financial thriller by Paul E. Erdman (Simon & Schuster, 1976), is another of the books that Slim showed off. The blurb on the back cover says: “Erdman knows about the intrigues of international high finance. No one is better placed than him to describe that world. With an expert hand he leads the reader to the power centers of today.” And there is The Fords: An American Epic, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Summit Books, 1987), about three generations of the family who created one of the greatest automobile empires, focusing on intergenerational conflicts.
By businessman Jean Paul Getty, whom Slim has been following since the 1960s, he has two books: the autobiography A mi manera (Grijalbo, 1977) and Así hice mi fortuna (Sayrols, 1987), whose first chaper is titled “How I made my first billion dollars.”
“I see there’s also poetry in your library,” I say when I notice a book by the popular Mexican poet Jaime Sabines.
“We edited this one. Well, his secretary edited it and we published it. Look, if you want to talk about poetry, this one is interesting,” he says, as he shuffles over to the far right of the bookcase, where he picks out a volume by Khalil Gibran.
Slim asks if I want him to read a poem by the Lebanese author on
