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 Editorials | Issues | June 2007 
A Mogul in Mexico Starts to Give Away Parts of His Fortune
 Elisabeth Malkin - International Herald Tribune
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| | Carlos Slim Helú, by some accounts the world's richest man, in his art gallery at his office in Mexico City. He has pledged to use his wealth to promote health and education. (Adriana Zehbrauskas/NYTimes) |
Mexico City - Carlos Slim Helú may well be the richest man in the world. And in Mexico, where 50 million people live in seemingly intractable poverty, that distinction has been drawing some heat.
Slim's companies all but control the Mexican telecommunications industry, and they have sold cellphones to 130 million people across the Americas.
His businesses have a hand in just about everything: One company built Mexico's largest offshore oil platform, another sells CDs. He has interests in retail, banking, insurance, mining, road building and cigarettes.
But because Mexico's income distribution is among the most skewed in the world, Slim has come to personify the small elite who control vast swaths of the country's economy. So he has been feeling the pressure to give much of his enormous fortune away.
Three months ago, he pledged to raise the endowments of his companies' foundations to $10 billion from $4 billion over the next four years. He promises to spend money on education and health. And he has begun to frequent the international philanthropy circuit, speaking at conferences, hobnobbing with Americans like Bill Clinton and some of the Kennedys.
In a freewheeling two-hour interview in his office recently, Slim promised that there would be no ceiling on his philanthropic donations. "We want to get to the root of problems, no limits," he said.
He has recently granted several interviews in his office, which is tucked above a branch of his bank and down the hall from a gallery showing off works from his wide-ranging collection of European and Mexican art.
The interviews, and a four-hour news conference in March, seem to be part of an effort to soften his robber baron image.
Fortified by Cuban cigars and Diet Coke, Slim mapped out a grand vision of what he planned to do with his fortune.
"It is a life project, it is a challenge," he said. "I think that charity and social programs don't resolve poverty."
"Poverty is resolved with education and jobs," he continued. "You don't need to teach a man how to fish, as the Chinese used to say. Instead of giving him the fish, instead of teaching him how to fish, you have to teach him how to sell the fish so that he eats something else besides a fish."
For that, he added, even before education, you need good health care, beginning with nutrition for pregnant women.
Skeptics argue that the value of Slim's philanthropy has to be measured against the damage his telephone monopoly has done to the economy.
"At some level, I can applaud his philanthropy but it would be better for Mexico if he stopped blocking competition first," said Denise Dresser, a political analyst and professor at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México who has written frequently about Slim.
Slim is now 67, a widower with six adult children. He has passed the day-to-day operations of his companies to his sons and sons-in-law.
"He has a lot of money, and he can think about larger issues," said Rossana Fuentes-Berain, the editorial page editor for the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, who has followed Slim's career for the past 15 years. "He wants to be part of that world where making money is not an end in itself."
The son of a Lebanese immigrant, Slim became rich by buying companies cheap and turning them around. But his ascent through the ranks of global billionaires began after the government sold the state-owned telephone monopoly, Teléfonos de México, in 1990 to a group he led with France Télécom and what was then Southwestern Bell.
Last year, Slim was ranked third on Forbes magazine's list of the world's richest people. This year, the magazine bumped him up to second place, estimating his net worth at $53.1 billion.
The Mexican online publication Sentido Común, which tracks his fortune closely, reports that his companies' value has grown so fast this year that he has now swept into first place with a fortune of $57 billion, above Bill Gates of Microsoft.
Along the way, he has fought off competitors and Mexico's antitrust regulator in the courts and lobbied against any legislation that might rein him in. Competitors say that his phone company, Telmex, deliberately stalls when it is required to link them to its national network and overcharges them to transport their signals. The governor of Mexico's central bank has criticized Telmex's monopoly control, arguing that it has held back Mexico's international competitiveness.
Slim concedes that Telmex controls 90 percent of Mexico's telephone lines but argues that his competitors have poached half the most profitable ones.
"We have never opposed the entry of a competitor," he said. "Let them come on in."
Still, with just 16 phone lines for every 100 people, Mexico lags well behind countries like Poland and Turkey in the reach of basic phone service.
With cash generated in Mexico, Slim has invested in cellphone service in Latin America, competing successfully in crowded markets like Brazil. His cellphone company, América Móvil, is the largest in Latin America.
Slim combines an omnivorous attention to detail with a penchant for simplicity. Everything you need to make a decision, he says, should fit on just one sheet of paper. That includes his obsession, baseball. He has pared down reams of baseball statistics to a handwritten page, where he rank the world's best sluggers.
But his precision with numbers seems to vanish when it comes to his philanthropy. He gives no accounting of what he has spent and is still vague about where much of the new money will go.
What he does say is that he plans to set up two institutes for health and education that will be focused on serving Latin America and the Caribbean. Each will be financed by an initial endowment of $500 million, said Arturo Elias, Slim's son-in-law and his point man for philanthropy. A smaller sports institute that will promote amateur and student sports will follow.
Slim tapped Dr. Julio Frenk, a former Mexican health minister who was on the short list to head the World Health Organization last year, to set up the health institute.
"The broad philosophy was already there," said Frenk, now a senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The institute will take on public health problems by sponsoring research, backing successful programs and disseminating health information.
Frenk said he sees the beneficiaries of these programs "as citizens with a right, because health and education are a right. But their access to that right has been limited."
Frenk's involvement has given pause to even Slim's strongest Mexican critics.
"If you are going to do this seriously, you need to have people who are professionals," Dresser said. "He's moving in the right direction in that sense."
Slim appears to be open to collaboration. Fifteen years ago, he met Nicholas Negroponte, who was then the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and is now traveling the world to raise money to give every child in the developing world a $100 laptop. (The price is closer to $175 right now.)
Slim is one of Negroponte's biggest backers, promising to spend $50 million to buy 250,000 laptops for children in Mexico and Central America. Their Internet connection will be free, Slim's son-in-law, Elias, promised.
In an e-mail, Negroponte said Slim "is very generous when it comes children, education and Latin America."
"I do not have to 'sell him' on the idea," Negroponte added. "It is vintage Slim." |
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