Carlos Slim by Diego Osorno

Author:Diego Osorno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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Carlos Slim is known for having a very relaxed sense of humor and for maintaining strong relationships with those closest to him. One of his best friends, businessman Ignacio Cobo, playfully refers to Slim as “a certain pain in the neck” when he phones officials to invite them for lunch to discuss legislation. Cobo also often tells entertaining stories about Slim and himself. One day they were traveling by car with a group of congressmen in the historical center of Mexico City. Slim was driving along one of the busiest streets and at some point he gently bumped the taxi in front of them. Slim was worried about the potential press scandal, so his friend Cobo promptly got out of the car and went to talk to the furious taxi driver. After a couple of minutes he returned to the car and told Slim to keep driving.

“What did you say?” the magnate asked his friend.

“I said my chauffeur was an idiot and asked him to please forgive us,” replied Cobo, laughing.

It seems absurd that someone with so much money should drive his own car, especially in Mexico City’s unbearable traffic. But an endless list could be made of the contradictions around Slim: the richest man in the world shares financial strategies with Fidel Castro to combat developing countries’ debt through swaps, a system of foreign debt exchange for shares in state-owned companies. In 2000, with the governmental turnover in Mexico, a group of Mexican intellectuals proposed that Slim finance a newspaper that would be called El Independiente. The multimillionaire responded that his business remit did not include projects linked with the media. A decade later, in addition to his shares in the New York Times and Grupo Prisa, he has purchased dozens of print, radio and television networks in Latin America.

In the 1990s, Slim maintained a very close relationship with businessman Juan Antonio Pérez Simón, who was the first director general of Telmex and Slim’s main partner at Grupo Carso, as well as Inbursa. In general, Slim’s former associate tends to say that the world of politics is full of pride, arrogance and haughtiness, in which people can turn on a dime from flattery to defamation and from loyalty to ruin. He also shares Slim’s wariness of foreign investors who arrive in Mexico, as they tend to have exclusively economic goals, and pay no attention to other business responsibilities. People close to Pérez Simón say that during his time as director general of Telmex he had several disagreements with the government of Salinas de Gortari, which always took place in the corridors of power.

“Salinas unleashed the forces of evil, muddied positions and changed up the signs several times,” Pérez Simón has said at our various meetings. In particular, Slim’s partner asserts that in 1994, during his last year in power, Salinas de Gortari named two presidential candidates—Donaldo Colosio (who was assassinated) and Zedillo—and made political maneuvers through characters as contrasting as Manuel Camacho Solís and Emilio Gamboa. However, Pérez Simón

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