Foreign Policy: How Slim Got Huge - (Carlos Slim that is)

Come back, Bill Gates! After some initial misgivings, the world had largely grown comfortable with the Microsoft founder as the closest thing capitalism has to a mascot—the No.1 spot on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s wealthiest people. We liked that Gates was a self-made Harvard dropout; that he helped make computers easier to use; that, due largely to him, it was suddenly cool to be a geek. Anger over Microsoft’s near monopoly status had subsided in recent years due in part to Gates’s stunning philanthropy and the emergence of Apple as a hip corporate alternative. Having Gates atop the Forbes list told us a lot about the world we lived in—that we were all part of a “new economy,” an ideas-driven society where technology, innovation, and intellectual capital were the keys to getting filthy rich.

What, then, to make of the man who in the summer of 2007 appears to have replaced Gates as the world’s richest person? His name is Carlos Slim Helú. Today, his fortune stands at more than $59 billion—and grew, on average, more than $1 billion a month last year. What kind of world are we living in now? Slim has been widely accused of monopolistic practices; he catapulted himself to the top spot on the back of his company Teléfonos de México, or Telmex, which has a 92 percent stranglehold on his country’s local fixed-line market. Slim’s business empire, the scope of which is largely unprecedented in modern economic history, ranges from cigarettes to airlines, from electric cables to floor tiles. In all, Slim’s net worth is equivalent to a stunning 6.6 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product (GDP), easily eclipsing Gates (0.4 percent of U.S. GDP) and even John D. Rockefeller at his peak (slightly less than 2 percent in 1937). Although it may be unsurprising to see such gross wealth disparity in Latin America, what do we make of the growing list of billionaires in countries such as China, India, and Russia that supposedly represent the global economy’s future? Are we entering a new era of robber barons? Does the shift of investment and production to emerging markets herald a rise in “crony capitalism” worldwide? Or does the rapidly accumulating wealth of Slim and his ilk merely signify an undesirable byproduct of a very desirable process—the spread of free-market capitalism around the globe?”*

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