Slim’s chance to change his legacy

Slim had managed to avoid any public notice or criticism for 25 years, but his anonymity ended when he entered the telecom sector in 1990. Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was in a privatization push, and Slim put in the winning bid to buy 51 percent voting control of the state-owned phone company for $1.8 billion.

The deal instantly stirred rumors, never substantiated, that Slim somehow had an inside track with his powerful pal in the presidential palace. Slim faced only two other bidders and had lined up backing from Whitacre's telco (then known as sbc) and France Télécom. Slim topped the next-highest bid — from a group that included gte and a Mexican brokerage firm run by Slim's first cousin — by $70 million. (The government sold most of its stake on the open market shortly after Slim closed the deal, gradually selling off the rest by 2001.)

For the first seven years Telmex held a monopoly on phone service, and it succeeded in imposing some of the highest prices anywhere in the world. (All bidders were offered a similar competition-free period.) The market opened to rivals in 1997, and Telmex tangled with competitors repeatedly over the high access fees it charged them. Since 1990 it has grown from 5 million phone lines to 18 million today, and holds 90 percent of the Mexican landline market. Its access charges to rivals, once at 5.8 cents per minute in revenue that competitors collected on long-distance calls, now are down to a penny a minute for traffic that starts or ends on a Telmex line.

Slim doubled down in telecom in the late 1990s, spinning off Telmex's wireless business into a new company called América Móvil. The company toppled market leader Iusacell, controlled by billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego, by targeting low-income callers and signing them up without requiring a credit card or bank account. It offered subsidized handsets and prepaid phone cards, and cell service grew from 9 million subscribers in 2000 to 39 million today.

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América Móvil netted $4 billion on $22 billion in revenue last year. Slim's 30 percent stake is worth $25 billion, slightly more than half his entire wealth; his 80 percent stake in Carso Global, which controls Telmex, is worth $11 billion.

The family patriarch started handing daily control of his collection of companies to his offspring in the late 1990s. His oldest son, Carlos, 39, runs Grupo Carso. Second-oldest son, Marco Antonio, 38, runs Inbursa, the financial services arm with $2.5 billion in annual sales. Third son, Patrick, 37, is the chairman of América Movíl. Son-in-law Daniel Hajj Aboumrad is América Movíl's chief executive; son-in-law Arturo Elias Ayub runs the Telmex Foundation and is Slim's spokesman; a third son-in-law, an architect, is designing Slim's new art museum.

Now Slim works on acquiring another elusive target: the love of his people. He insists this isn't important to him, but he makes it clear that he is aware of his advancing age, cognizant that his time is running out. In the past decade his foundation has handed out 150,750 college scholarships, 10 million pairs of contact lenses and 66 million bicycles to poor kids who wouldn't otherwise get to school.

He now says this falls short. In the early 1990s he was doing only 1 percent of what he should have been doing on the charity front, Slim says. Today he's at maybe 20 percent. "I agree that I'm not doing enough," he says. "Because, for me, doing enough is not a problem of money. It is an issue of how much I am or am not solving problems."

On an office wall is a work of art given to him by an aging friend with "too much time on his hands," Slim says. It shows only a metal ruler mounted on white canvas and painted yellow until the 62-inch mark, then white to 75, then green up to 100. Slim says it tracks his advancing age — and his declining mental acuity. "Until here is where my brain is good," he says, pointing to the number 72. Then he eyes the green portion from 75 to 100. "Here is where my brain is not so good." Based on Slim's own math, he has five years or so to set things right.

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