MEXICO CITY (MCT) — The Mexican tycoon who might just be the world's richest man almost never uses computers. Instead, Carlos Slim crunches numbers on a spreadsheet he created and has scrawled in a tattered notebook.
Through this data table, Slim determined that Babe Ruth was the greatest hitter ever. The obsessive scholar of baseball prefers the old days. His all-time top 10 includes no player of the past 50 years.
Slim prefers old movies, too, such as "El Cid," about a Spanish nobleman who became a heroic military leader and shook up society. In that era, "the good guys were good," Slim explained, "and the bad guys were bad."
Few alternate between the white and black hats more than Latin America's most powerful businessman. In a rare, two-hour interview with the Chicago Tribune, he took time off from running his $60 billion empire to share his views on money, life and his legacy.
He wonders whether he will be remembered as the modern-day version of the tycoons who ran American monopolies during the Rockefeller era or as a philanthropist who promises to leave billions of dollars to help alleviate social problems.
Slim, 68, is virtually unknown in the U.S. but is a polarizing figure here. A recent book postulated that it is impossible for an ordinary Mexican to go 24 hours without putting money in his pocket.
Critics say his fortune was built through political favors and that his telecommunications empire is one of several virtual monopolies that hold back the economy and are harmful to ordinary Mexicans because they keep prices high.
Depending on stock prices, Slim on some days is the world's richest man, jockeying with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. That wealth can attract an unflattering spotlight, including an investigation by Mexican antitrust regulators announced last week. But he also has started to win praise throughout Latin America for building a new model of development-based philanthropy.
Slim said he cares little about the increased scrutiny or even the praise. Famously elusive, he gruffly protested as a photographer tried to take his picture during his interview, consenting only at the end.
"I think it is important to have a conscience at peace," he said. "Like they say, you are a bullfighter not for the public but for the bull."
The descendant of Lebanese immigrants, Slim says his father, a successful merchant, introduced him to money by giving him a book in which he tracked his savings account. By age 12 he bought his first stock — in Banco Nacional de Mexico — and began tracking the market.
An engineer who later taught algebra and linear programming in college, Slim says he is fascinated with numbers, which fuels his passion for baseball.
He eventually accumulated a diverse array of companies that range from restaurants to cigarettes. His crown jewel is the Telmex phone company, acquired when it was privatized by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1990.
A close ally of Salinas, Slim got a favorable deal that gave him sole control of the industry for seven years. Those guarantees are gone, but Slim still controls more than 90 percent of the land-line phone market share and about 75 percent of the cellular phone market, according to a United Nations study.
The study, published in January, blames weak regulations in Mexico for failing to ensure fair competition.
That kind of dominance is not unusual in Mexico. Motorists filling up their car have one choice: gas from the state-owned Pemex company. Televisa and TV Azteca own more than 90 percent of the broadcast market and have kept new competitors out.
Slim says most of the criticism comes from would-be competitors or from lawmakers who have no economic credentials. He suggests there is nothing wrong with market dominance if the consumer doesn't suffer.
"Look, the only way to judge if it is wrong or right is look at the prices," he said. "If a beer costs $1 here and in the United States it costs $2, there is no competition problem."
The U.N. study credited Telmex with modernizing Mexico's telephone industry while reducing rates. But another international group, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, found that Mexico is among the most expensive of the largest nations in fixed-line and cell-phone rates, typically charging twice what U.S. consumers pay.
U.S. and Mexican officials want the near-monopolies dismantled because they keep prices higher for consumers and raise the costs of doing business. Mexican antitrust regulators announced last month that they would investigate the telephone industry.
At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last month, former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow told reporters: "What Mexico needs is to promote competition in the telephone industry, to let the markets in telephones and energy work. That would be very positive and powerful."
Jorge Zepeda, a political analyst and editor of a recent book called "The Masters of Mexico," about the country's richest families, said he fears it is too late to undo the dominance of Slim and others such as Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala, the billionaire heiress to the company that brews Corona beer.
And Zepeda finds little groundswell among ordinary Mexicans to change the system.
In fact, Mexicans felt pride, not outrage, last year when Slim ascended to become the world's richest man.
"It's almost like an Olympic medal, which is an absolute stupidity," Zepeda said. "The other side of Carlos Slim becoming the richest man in the world is that all of us Mexicans pay his fortune."
Slim has been criticized for not sharing more of his wealth. He famously dismissed the efforts of Gates and other moguls "going around like Santa Claus."
Slim explains that traditional charity isn't the answer to poverty and that his corporations do more by providing more than 200,000 jobs. He said many rich people — specifically excluding Gates — were charitable only to get their pictures in the paper.
"What interests me is not that they give me a monument or that they give me an award every day," he said.
He feels as if his message isn't getting through, that he is coming off as uncaring. "Would you like me to read you something about what I think?" Slim finally asked.
As if he had anticipated the line of questioning, he walked to a bookshelf and pulled out a book by Kahlil Gibran, a 20th century writer from his family's ancestral homeland of Lebanon.
Slim paged to a passage called "Giving," directed toward a rich man. "What are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?" Slim read aloud. "And tomorrow, what shall tomorrow bring to the overprudent dog burying bones in the trackless sand?"
As his philanthropy grows, Slim has been a key figure in restoring Mexico City's historic center. He has pledged to donate up to 1 million laptops to poor students.
Last year, Slim had pledged to increase the endowments of his foundations from $4 billion to $10 billion. He backed away from that figure, saying there was no "magic number," but vowed to donate "whatever it takes" to solve pressing social problems.
Former President Bill Clinton, at a 2005 conference, praised "my good friend Carlos Slim" for starting "any number of amazing initiatives for Latin America."