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.”
For a few minutes Slim relates some of the 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,