The Saturday Wall Street Journal ran a good piece on Mexico's Carlos Slim. Though I don't know why pieces like this are run in the Saturday Journal and not Barron's.
Wait a minute. Of course I do. They put stuff like this in the Saturday Journal to get people to buy the Saturday edition. (Assuming the Saturday edition makes money for Dow Jones, fine. But keep the lifestyle stuff in the Saturday WSJ and put articles like this one in Barron's.)
Back to the Carlos Slim article. Some interesting bits:
In all, his companies account for more than a third of the total value of Mexico's leading stock market index, while his fortune represents 7% of the country's annual economic output. (At his height, John D. Rockefeller's wealth was equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.)
Admirers say the hard-charging Mr. Slim, an insomniac who stays up late reading history and has a fondness for reading about Ghengis Khan and his deceptive military strategies, embodies Mexico's potential to become a Latin tiger.
Mr. Slim's strategy has been consistent over his long career: Buy companies on the cheap, whip them into shape, and ruthlessly drive competitors out of business. After Mr. Slim got control of Telmex in 1990, he quickly cornered the market for copper cables used by Telmex for telephone wires. He bought one of the two main suppliers and made sure Telmex didn't buy any cable from the other big supplier, eventually prompting the owners to sell the company to him.
Slim has been influenced by Alvin Toffler, and the two have become friends.
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