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 giving, and I say yes, knowing that he did the same in 2007 to Time magazine journalist Tim Padgett when asked about his way of doing philanthropy.
And so, standing next to his bookshelves, his blue tie loosened and his sky-blue shirt monogrammed with his initials, one of the richest men in the world starts reading a poem.
All you have shall someday be given;
Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors’.
You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”
The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.
They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.
Khalil Gibran, known in Mexico as Gibran Khalil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant in America who wrote in English and published The Prophet in 1923, is one of Slim’s favorite authors. Others on his list are contemporary Mexicans such as Ángeles Mastretta and Carlos Fuentes, who fictionalized part of his relationship with Slim in La voluntad y la fortuna (Destiny and Desire), one of his last books. Slim and Fuentes used to meet frequently before the writer died. Slim also befriended the late Colombian Nobel-Prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez.
Other high-profile acquaintances include American ex-president Bill Clinton, scientist Stephen Hawking, historian Hugh Thomas, futurologist Alvin Toffler, strategist Nicholas Negroponte and the Spanish socialist ex-president Felipe González, who is also his friend. All of them have visited the billionaire’s house in Lomas de Chapultepec, some of them on a Sunday or Monday night, which is when Slim’s children—Marco Antonio, Patrick, Soumaya, Vanessa and Johanna—meet for dinner and chat about different topics with international personalities of science, literature and politics. Since 2002, Fundación Telmex has organized an international symposium in Mexico City. Slim invites some of the people he knows or admires to deliver a keynote speech that only the young interns and specific staff from his companies have access to. The list of speakers is as long as it is diverse, and reveals the kind of convening power Slim possesses, as well as some of his interests and passions. In 2002, for example, the legendary football star Pelé was a guest, while in 2003 guests included Alvin Toffler, ex-president Bill Clinton and basketball player Earvin “Magic” Johnson. In 2004, guests were Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, and from the United States, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. In 2005, actor Goldie Hawn and Argentinian ex-football player Jorge Valdano were guests, while in 2006, a year of troubled presidential elections in Mexico, the symposium did not take place.
In 2007 the international catwalk of Slim’s acquaintances was set in motion once more and guests included singer Gloria Estefan, athlete Carl Lewis, and Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard. In 2008, actor and activist Jane Fonda was invited, and, also from the United States, Colin Powell, former secretary of state. Between 2009 and 2013, the list of guests included former president of Chile Ricardo Lagos, tennis player Anna Kournikova, actor Forest Whitaker, cofounder of Twitter Biz Stone, journalist Larry King, filmmaker James Cameron, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, president of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, Brazilian former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, trainer Joséph Guardiola, former British prime minister Tony Blair, writer Deepak Chopra, swimmer Michael Phelps, cofounder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, actor Al Pacino, founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, actor Antonio Banderas, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
This list of characters is as varied and contradictory as the image of Slim tends to be. As a man who says he is politically neither on the left nor the right, it would seem that his political geometry is determined solely by capital.
We return to the tour of his library.
“These here are books I’ve read, lots are about business, but I have many more books at home,” Slim clarifies as we walk past one of his bookshelves.
“And what else do you read?”
“Lots of things.”
“Do you read economic theory?”
“No, I rarely read theory. I don’t like it.”
“So you’re an