The World's Richest Man On Fixing The Global Economy? ~ MAKE MONEY BLOG$

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Even before that report came out Slim was eager to rebut the charges of high prices when I mentioned them. “That’s what competitors say, but if that were true, they would take the market from us,” he says, bristling a bit. “The customers are not fools.” He pulls out a chart from a December report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch showing wireless revenues at 4 cents per minute in Mexico, nearly as low as the U.S., with 3 cents.

“That’s quite a cynical take on monopoly pricing power and cost structures,” says billionaire Ricardo Salinas, who is chairman of mobile network competitor Iusacell and also controls Mexico’s number two broadcaster, Azteca. “What Mexico needs is a level regulatory playing field that makes long-term competition feasible. There’s a fear with some government officials to take on the status quo.”

The rise in Slim’s net worth over the past three decades has been nothing short of remarkable. He first appeared on FORBES’ Billionaires list in 1991 at $1.7 billion, based primarily on his Grupo Carso stake. Nine years later Telmex split off its mobile phone service business into América Móvil, which listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in early 2001. By then Slim’s net worth had grown to $10.8 billion.

In the following years América Móvil acquired mobile phone network operators throughout Central America and South America—it now operates in 18 countries, including Mexico and the U.S. Between 2004 and 2008 its split-adjusted share price grew sixfold to $30. That propelled Slim, with a $60 billion fortune, to move ahead of longtime number one richest man Bill Gates in 2008 to the number two spot (Warren Buffett was the richest that year). Slim held the title of world’s richest man in 2010, 2011 and this year.

When I ask Slim how his life has changed over two decades as an ever richer billionaire, he quips, “It’s not money.” (True—it’s primarily the value of shares he and his family own in public companies.) Then he adds that his life hasn’t changed at all. Like Warren Buffett, he’s lived in the same house for much of his adult life. “My bachelor house was better than where I have lived for 40 years,” he says. I mention that he used to drive himself to work in a blue Thunderbird in the early 1990s. “I still drive,” he responds— but now, with security guards, in a four-year-old Mercedes.

I press him again, and Slim does admit that having great wealth has indeed changed things. “I have more activity, more responsibility and more compromise,” he says. The compromise, he explains, is the challenge of solving Mexico’s problems. “I’m trying to make our country better in the areas that I can. I am not the police,” he adds, alluding to Mexico’s ongoing, bloody battle against the drug cartels. He wants his 6 children and his grandchildren (all 19 of them) to follow in his footsteps and do even more work to help Mexico change. Slim, whose wife, Soumaya, died in 1999, makes sure to see his family at least once a week: He has dinner with his children every Monday and lunch with his grandchildren every Wednesday.

His biggest goal is a fight against poverty—but not for the usual reasons. “It’s good economically. In the past it was something ethical and moral,” he asserts, speaking like the rational capitalist he is. “To take poor people out of poverty and put them in the modern economy is very good for the economy, for the country, for society and for business. It is the best investment.”

It’s not something that should be left to the government, either. “I think that businessmen and entrepreneurs have more experience managing resources, and we can more easily solve the problems than politicians, who have other views. They are thinking about elections, they are thinking about popularity,” says Slim. “I don’t think that giving money should be something done for personal popularity.”

But how to do so? Slim is skeptical of traditional charity. “I am convinced that the private sector needs to give support, not money, because charity has not solved poverty in hundreds of years.” He believes the best course for chipping away at poverty is using digital tools for education to, as he says, “create human capital.” That’s where Telmex, the Carlos Slim Foundation and the Telmex Foundation come in.

The latest endeavor of Slim’s two foundations and Telmex is a system of digital libraries. “Now, instead of going to the library, you go to a digital library where you can navigate [computers] completely free,” says Slim. “Instead of lending a book, we’ll lend a laptop for 15 days.” There are some 3,500 digital libraries. Slim’s aim is to enable 60% of Latin America to have access to computers by 2015—the same timeline set by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. So far these newfangled libraries are only in Mexico, which means he’s got a lot of ground to cover.

Slim won’t say how much of his fortune he plans on giving away eventually. So far he’s put a total of $4 billion into the Carlos Slim Foundation—via $2 billion installments in 2006 and 2010, funded by dividends. Its main areas of focus are education and health. “It’s about the development of people’s potential. He wants to make it easier for people to generate wealth,” explains Alejandro Soberón, the chief executive of entertainment company CIE and a longtime América Móvil board member. “I travel all over Latin America, and I don’t think there’s another businessman who’s had the impact he’s had on health and education.”

In 2010 the Slim Foundation partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the government of Spain in a five-year program to improve the health of the poorest 20% of the population in southern Mexico and Central America; each partner contributed $50 million. With the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard (funded by Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad), Slim’s foundation began collaborating in 2010 on a three-year study of the genomic roots of cancer and type 2 diabetes in Mexican and Latin American populations, with the Slim Foundation paying $65 million. “It’s a visionary piece of philanthropy,” says Broad Institute director Eric Lander, explaining that in cancer the researchers were looking for mutations to help guide treatment. The researchers have already discovered genes linked to breast cancer, head and neck cancer and diabetes.

source: forbes.com

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