Читать книгу Carlos Slim - Diego Osorno - Страница 15
ОглавлениеCarlos Slim gets up from the table, where we are talking about the various influences he has had in his life, and pads over to the library, which takes up a section of his massive, carpeted office. He points out a few books.
“Look, this one about Baruch is interesting. And this one about Ling, who created a conglomerate and ended up bankrupting it, but it’s interesting to see how he did it. This one’s about Vesco, who ended up keeping a fund and then ran away to Cuba. It’s a great book because it describes the crisis of the ’70s. This one’s about Ford. Here’s the one about Don Pepe Iturriaga that I was telling you about the other day. This is a book about Getty, and this is the other one about Getty that I read when it was featured in Playboy magazine.”
The Mexican millionaire picks out a dog-eared paperback from the shelf: Así hice mi fortuna, by American oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty, first published in English as My Life and Fortunes in 1963. As Slim flicks through it, I notice the title of the first chapter: “How I made my first billion dollars,” and see that there are sentences and paragraphs underlined in black ink. It’s one of the few books in Spanish in this section of the library, where most books are in English, which Slim has been reading and speaking since he was young.
“Was Getty your main role model in the business world?”
“Not at all! Not my main role model. Baruch comes before him. And Rockefeller before Baruch,” he replies, and again turns to his books. “Look, this is the book about Rockefeller’s grandson, and the one about Chrysler is over there somewhere. You learn from all of them, and as I say, you learn from the good and the bad. In this book, for example, there’s a good analysis of Gates when he was starting out. The author gets it spot on. He says: ‘This guy’s not merely selling, he’s developing his business properly.’ This one, for example, is Paper Money.”
Slim reads mostly biographies, books on business, sports and finance statistics, as well as history. The books are tightly packed in a heaving, six-shelf bookcase that takes up the whole of one of the walls of his 900-plus-square-foot office, very near the house in which he’s lived for forty years. On display in his office are family photos, classical paintings, and a Spartan desk that Slim hardly ever uses, since he prefers to work at a table strewn with documents and sometimes diabetic chocolate wrappers. Although he is shortsighted in his right eye, he has perfect vision in his left, allowing him to read without glasses at his seventy-five years of age. He often interrupts our interviews to show me some of his books or documents kept in this library. If, as Borges said, we are not what we have written but what we have read, these interruptions from Slim are more revealing than some of the things he says, as they reflect part of the personality of a Mexican whose methods of wealth accumulation are questioned by many, and whose fortune, according to researcher José Merino’s calculations, could support the poorest 10 percent of Mexico’s households for almost fourteen years.
One of the books he pointed out the first time we met in his office was Mr. Baruch by Margaret L. Coit, published in English by Houghton Mifflin in 1957, the year Slim began his civil engineering studies at the UNAM. It’s the biography of Bernard Baruch, an American financier who became a millionaire in the early twentieth century by speculating on the sugar market, and who was nicknamed the Lone Wolf of Wall Street because he acted outside the financial institutions of the time. Baruch then unexpectedly left Wall Street for Washington, DC, to work in politics, and he served as a war adviser during the governments of Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman.
Another of the biographies Slim has read is Ling: The Rise, Fall, and Return of a Texas Titan, by Stanley H. Brown. Published by Atheneum in 1972, it tells the story of Jim Ling, an electrician from Oklahoma who, with only a high school education, became one of the great corporate speculators and the creator of Ling-Temco-Vought—one of the world’s largest conglomerates—until it went bankrupt with the 1970s crisis in the United States. There is also Vesco, by Robert A. Hutchison (Praeger, 1974), about Roberto Vesco, a fascinating and contradictory character, son of an Italian father and Yugoslavian mother, born in Detroit, who didn’t even finish high school—although at age thirty, thanks to his remarkable salesmanship, he became a millionaire, even if he did then scam a Swiss company for several million dollars and flee to the Caribbean: first to the Bahamas, then to Costa Rica, and eventually to Cuba, where he was warmly received by the revolutionary government until he likewise scammed a nephew of Fidel Castro and landed in a Havana jail.
The Crash of ’79, a financial thriller by Paul E. Erdman (Simon & Schuster, 1976), is another of the books that Slim showed off. The blurb on the back cover says: “Erdman knows about the intrigues of international high finance. No one is better placed than him to describe that world. With an expert hand he leads the reader to the power centers of today.” And there is The Fords: An American Epic, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Summit Books, 1987), about three generations of the family who created one of the greatest automobile empires, focusing on intergenerational conflicts.
By businessman Jean Paul Getty, whom Slim has been following since the 1960s, he has two books: the autobiography A mi manera (Grijalbo, 1977) and Así hice mi fortuna (Sayrols, 1987), whose first chaper is titled “How I made my first billion dollars.”
“I see there’s also poetry in your library,” I say when I notice a book by the popular Mexican poet Jaime Sabines.
“We edited this one. Well, his secretary edited it and we published it. Look, if you want to talk about poetry, this one is interesting,” he says, as he shuffles over to the far right of the bookcase, where he picks out a volume by Khalil Gibran.
Slim asks if I want him to read a poem by the Lebanese author on giving, and I say yes, knowing that he did the same in 2007 to Time magazine journalist Tim Padgett when asked about his way of doing philanthropy.
And so, standing next to his bookshelves, his blue tie loosened and his sky-blue shirt monogrammed with his initials, one of the richest men in the world starts reading a poem.
All you have shall someday be given;
Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors’.
You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”
The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.
They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.
Khalil Gibran, known in Mexico as Gibran Khalil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant in America who wrote in English and published The Prophet in 1923, is one of Slim’s favorite authors. Others on his list are contemporary Mexicans such as Ángeles Mastretta and Carlos Fuentes, who fictionalized part of his relationship with Slim in La voluntad y la fortuna (Destiny and Desire), one of his last books. Slim and Fuentes used to meet frequently before the writer died. Slim also befriended the late Colombian Nobel-Prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez.
Other high-profile acquaintances include American ex-president Bill Clinton, scientist Stephen Hawking, historian Hugh Thomas, futurologist Alvin Toffler, strategist Nicholas Negroponte and the Spanish socialist ex-president Felipe González, who is also his friend. All of them have visited the billionaire’s house in Lomas de Chapultepec, some of them on a Sunday or Monday night, which is when Slim’s children—Marco Antonio, Patrick, Soumaya, Vanessa and Johanna—meet for dinner and chat about different topics with international personalities of science, literature and politics. Since 2002, Fundación Telmex has organized an international symposium in Mexico City. Slim invites some of the people he knows or admires to deliver a keynote speech that only the young interns and specific staff from his companies have access to. The list of speakers is as long as it is diverse, and reveals the kind of convening power Slim possesses, as well as some of his interests and passions. In 2002, for example, the legendary football star Pelé was a guest, while in 2003 guests included Alvin Toffler, ex-president Bill Clinton and basketball player Earvin “Magic” Johnson. In 2004, guests were Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, and from the United States, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. In 2005, actor Goldie Hawn and Argentinian ex-football player Jorge Valdano were guests, while in 2006, a year of troubled presidential elections in Mexico, the symposium did not take place.
In 2007 the international catwalk of Slim’s acquaintances was set in motion once more and guests included singer Gloria Estefan, athlete Carl Lewis, and Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard. In 2008, actor and activist Jane Fonda was invited, and, also from the United States, Colin Powell, former secretary of state. Between 2009 and 2013, the list of guests included former president of Chile Ricardo Lagos, tennis player Anna Kournikova, actor Forest Whitaker, cofounder of Twitter Biz Stone, journalist Larry King, filmmaker James Cameron, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, president of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, Brazilian former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, trainer Joséph Guardiola, former British prime minister Tony Blair, writer Deepak Chopra, swimmer Michael Phelps, cofounder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, actor Al Pacino, founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, actor Antonio Banderas, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
This list of characters is as varied and contradictory as the image of Slim tends to be. As a man who says he is politically neither on the left nor the right, it would seem that his political geometry is determined solely by capital.
We return to the tour of his library.
“These here are books I’ve read, lots are about business, but I have many more books at home,” Slim clarifies as we walk past one of his bookshelves.
“And what else do you read?”
“Lots of things.”
“Do you read economic theory?”
“No, I rarely read theory. I don’t like it.”
“So you’re an omnivore?”
“Look, these here are art books.”
The businessman who built one of Mexico’s biggest museums, which carries the name of his late wife Soumaya, points at the shelf holding mostly gifted volumes that he has decided to keep in his library, a few of the hundreds that arrive each year and that pile up, along with other kinds of gifts, in a room next door that functions as a customs office or sorting heap.
We continue walking and Slim remembers something. From between the book Historia de la deuda exterior de México (History of Mexico’s Foreign Debt), written by Jan Bazant and published by El Colegio de México in 1968, and the biography Hammer, by Armand Hammer and Neil Lyndon, he picks out an old volume entitled Geometría analítica y cálculo infinitesimal (Analytic Geometry and Calculus), by F. Woods and F. H. Bailey (UTEHA, 1979).
“This is my book from second year in college,” he says, proudly.
Then appears La Reina del Sur (The Queen of the South), a novel by Arturo Pérez Reverte about a woman from Sinaloa involved in international drug trafficking. Slim explains:
“This is out of place. There are others here I haven’t read, either… Look, this one’s very good. Look at what a lovely title it has.” I read on the cover Reinas, mujeres y diosas. Mágicos destinos (Queens, Women and Goddesses: Magical Destinies), while Slim rips off the plastic wrapping that still covers it.
“We published it at Sanborns and the cover is a painting from the museum,” he says, and continues searching. “The Peter Principle, this is a great one.” He shows me the book, whose author is famous in the business world because of his adage: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of their incompetence. The cream rises till it sours.”
In this same section there is a beautifully illustrated book about modern warfare, which Slim says he just read and that I should also read to my son. There is a biography of the Kennedys and the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. He asks me if I have read it. When I say I haven’t, he says I should and gives it to me. I take it and eye the subtitle on the cover, not wondering whether it might be a hint: “Why some people succeed and others don’t.”
Slim is not only a voracious reader, but also one of the biggest booksellers in Mexico. Sanborns, his chain of about 200 restaurants and department stores, includes the country’s biggest network of bookshops, which implies that for authors and publishing houses it is vital to establish a commercial relationship with the company, currently headed up by Patrick, the youngest of his sons.
“If your book is not in Sanborns, it does not exist. It’s that simple,” said an experienced publisher I have worked with a number of times. For years there have been rumors that books are censored if Slim or his inner circle find them uncomfortable. But Slim says this is untrue and cites an example: Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, MIT and Harvard professors respectively, wrote Why Nations Fail, in which they include a small section about the owner of Telmex. “Slim has made his millions in the Mexican economy in large part thanks to his political connections. When he has ventured into the United States, he has not been successful.” This section made Slim consider the possibility of undertaking legal proceedings to force a public retraction from these professors, who come from two of the most prestigious universities in the world and whose book has been praised by several Nobel Prize winners in economics.
A man who did take legal action against the publishing house was Jacques Rogozinski, who led the privatizations as head of the Office for Divestiture of Public Enterprises during the government of Salinas de Gortari, the period during which Slim bought Telmex. Rogozinski objected to the phrase that said, “Even though Slim did not put in the highest bid, a consortium led by his Grupo Carso won the auction,” and managed to get the publishing house to remove it from the following edition.
“Despite everything, we’re selling that book at Sanborns. It sold 700 copies at 349 pesos,” said Slim.
“You’ve never blocked a book?”
“Well, yes, there was just one time when we didn’t sell one.”
“Which one?”
“I can’t remember his name, but the author told us that if we didn’t do this or that, he was going to stand outside Sanborns to sell it himself, just to attract publicity. So we sold it for a while, just to get him off our back.”
“Do you mean the journalist Rafael Loret de Mola?”
“How do you know?”
“Well, because he publicly denounced it in the 1990s.”
“Yes, it was a sort of pressure we weren’t keen on, but he’s a good guy; he’s a bit weird and all, but a good guy.”
In addition to being a reader, seller and even occasional publisher of books, Slim might soon become the author of his own biography. The first time I interviewed him, one of the things he clarified was that he was writing a book about his life and family too, and that in that task he was being helped by his nephew Roberto Slim Seade, “a kind of personal secretary,” son of his late brother, Julián, and formal manager of the family’s hotel companies.
“I’m writing the only authorized biography that will exist, just that right now I have other work to do,” he cautioned at the time. “I will answer any questions you have, but regarding your book all I ask is that you don’t put in too many lies.”
Vicente Fox was the PAN (National Action Party) politician who in 2000 ended the seventy-two years of uninterrupted government by the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). Slim, who says he voted for the PRI in those historic presidential elections, financially supported Fox’s campaign. After winning the elections, Fox governed Mexico between 2000 and 2006, maintaining a close relationship with Slim, which was evident not only in the lack of regulation of Slim’s telecom monopoly, but also in the appointment of former Grupo Carso employees to key government departments. One such person was Pedro Cerisola, a former Telmex executive who became minister of communications and transport.
During those years, Slim was regularly invited to meetings at the official presidential residence and office of Los Pinos. On one of those occasions, after a lunch meeting, Slim visited the library and for some reason, one of the leather-bound books caught his eye. The title on the spine was “Leonardo,” and he went to have a closer look. He picked it out of the shelf, opened it, and found a handwritten note on the first page: “This book was donated by Linda H. de Slim.” It was a biography of the famous Italian inventor and artist, and donated by Slim’s mother, Linda, to the presidential library in the ’70s. Slim showed me a facsimile of that biography of da Vinci that he had made. As well as showing Slim’s special connection with books, this episode is also revealing of the Slim family’s long-standing close ties to the presidency at Los Pinos.
“So, is this the library where you keep your most prized volumes?” I ask.
“Look, I don’t have a uniform mentality. I am very plural.”
“But this is a special library, and it’s interesting to see it, because, as they say, ‘By your books you will know thyself.’”
“No, you won’t get to know me, because these are also books here about all the stupid things you can think of,” he scoffs, and then resumes the tour of the library. “Look, here is the annual report from the Banco de México 1994. Why ’94? Because here is the history of the devaluation,” he shows me a series of economic indicators in tiny print and points out the date: March 21. “Here is Colosio, here the reserves, and how far they are taken. Here is the ‘December error,’” he says, alluding to the mishandling of the sudden devaluation of the Mexican peso that took place that month. This was a factor that, along with the political instability following the assassination of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and the Zapatista uprising, led to a severe financial collapse of major international consequences, known as the “Mexican peso crisis.” The IMF managing director called it “the first major crisis of the twenty-first century,” and it has been argued by some that one of the underlying causes was the too-rapid process of banking liberalization in the country.
Then he pulls out a hardcover book. It’s the memoirs of George Bush Sr. On the first pages there is a dedication, but all I manage to read is: “Family and friends,” and a date, May 2006.
“This book by Bush is out of this world. Did you know that he and Gorbachov made a deal?”
“To end the Cold War?”
“No, no, not just that. They also agreed to bring democracy and freedom to the whole world. What happened in Chile—Pinochet’s resignation—was their doing. So was Panama—the fall of Noriega—and everything that happened throughout Eastern Europe—the Prague Spring. A fascinating read.”
Another of the signed copies that Slim shows me is Leadership, by Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York, famous for implementing repressive policies. I barely manage to read the final words in Spanish: “With admiration and friendship,” and then the signature of the author, who is now a security consultant. Near Giuliani’s book is El desacuerdo nacional (The National Disagreement), by Manuel Camacho Solís, the Mexican politician who in 1994 acted as an intermediary between the government and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Slim reads the dedication to me: “To Carlos Slim, who can see the forest for the trees and turn what he imagines into reality, with my friendship and determined conviction of reaching an agreement to grow with justice.”
We carry on along the bookshelves and he takes out a bound manuscript whose cover says, “Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin Toeffler.”
“Alvin Toeffler asked me to take a look at this before it was published.”
He flicks through the volume, where I notice some handwritten notes in the margins of the greatest contemporary futurologist, who is a friend of Slim’s.
“And did you make any corrections?”
“It has some numbers errors.”
“And did Toffler make the changes?”
“No, because in the end I didn’t get them to him in time.”
Unlike the book Why Nations Fail, of which Sanborns bought the small amount of 700 copies, the Spanish print run of Revolutionary Wealth was bought almost in its entirety by Slim’s chain.
The tour of his library continues, and at some point we are right in front of the book Los retos que enfrentamos (The Challenges We Face), published in 2014 by former president Felipe Calderón, but Slim ignores it. Meanwhile, he picks out with enthusiasm an old volume entitled Desarrollo estabilizador (Stabilizing Development), by Antonio Ortiz Mena, and exclaims:
“This is excellent!”
“What will you do with these books?”
“Do you mean what will my children do with them when I die?”
“Well, you could also do something before then.”
“Do you mean am I going to donate my collection? Nope.”
“Why not give it to the reading library at UNAM?”
“No, we have studies centers.”
“Or the University of Austin. For example, the politician Bill Richardson just donated his library to them.”
“But in the United States, they buy them.”
“True, Gabriel García Márquez’s library was bought there for $2 million.”
“Twelve million?”
“No, $2 million.”
“No, that’s too cheap.”
“And Bill’s?”
“I think he donated it.”
For a brief moment Slim remains silent, as if thinking about what will happen to his books in the future.
But he doesn’t speak further on it.
“I’ve never worn glasses. I’ve been reading with my left eye since I was young.”
“And why did you never get a laser operation?”
“In those days there were no operations.”
“And now?”
“Why would I get operated if I read fine with my left eye?”
“I got the operation a year ago and it changed my life.”
“Sure, but in ten years you’ll be back to where you were.”
“But I will have had ten years of not wearing glasses.”
“Yes, but you’re going to live fifty more. You’ll have a tough time, kid, believe me… No, my eyesight is fine, I can read fine. Let’s see, look, get me something in fine print.”
Holding up some financial documents in fine print, the magnate starts reading out loud to perfection.
I asked two successful businessmen in their thirties, separately, whether they thought it was interesting to know what books Slim has in his library. Despite the generational gap and the fact that they are critical of the billionaire’s dominant role in the business world, both said yes. After I’d mentioned some of the titles, one of them told me he’d started to look for them to read them soon, while the other one was amazed because he didn’t know most of them, despite being an avid reader of books about finance and business strategies. The titles I found in Slim’s library, where the most repeated word was “money,” included Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, by John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin, 1975); The Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power and Profits, by Sarah Barlett (Warner Books, 1991); Paper Money, by Adam Smith (Dell, 1982), Super-Money, by Adam Smith (Random House, 1972), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin, 2009), The Warren Buffett Way: Investment Strategies of the World’s Greatest Investor, by Robert G. Hagstrom (Wiley, 1997), a Spanish edition of The Peter Prescription: How to Make Things Go Right, by Laurence J. Peter (Plaza & Janés, 1991), a Spanish edition of Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation From Stifling People and Strangling Profits, by Robert Townsend (Grijalbo, 1970), and The Money Lords: The Great Finance Capitalists, 1925–1950, by Mathew Joséphson (Weybright and Talley, 1972).
Of all the titles in this section, the one that intrigued me most was a Spanish edition of Winning Through Intimidation, by Robert J. Ringer (V Siglos, 1974), first published in English in 1973. My book dealer told me it would be difficult to find, but he would help me find it for a thousand pesos. I asked the same bookseller how much he thought he could get for a 1960s edition of a book by Getty underlined by Slim; he replied that it would be worth between 50,000 and 100,000 pesos.
I also talked about the list of over 100 books that I identified in the library with Daniel Gershenson, a prominent independent activist and critic of Slim’s monopolistic practices. Gershenson, who lived a large part of his life in New York, was of the opinion that “his selection of titles is quite conventional; indistinguishable from that of any rich dude from Wall Street (a ‘master of the universe,’ as Tom Wolfe would call him), who might also be a baseball or basketball fan.”
Of the dozens of sports books that are also in Slim’s library, Gershenson pointed out that the billionaire had a biography of Ty Cobb, the Detroit Tigers’ player who was nicknamed the Peach of Georgia and considered by experts to be the best baseball player in history, even above the famous Babe Ruth: “Cobb was a cantankerous, confrontationally racist, and belligerent player in Major League Baseball, which was segregated until 1947, when Jackie Robinson—the first black player—was hired by the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Known for his violent tendencies and his spikes-up displays of cruelty in an era when those “character traits” were highly valued, Cobb was a man who, according to North American folklore, twisted the rules and grabbed undue advantages for the sake of achieving his goal: to win at all costs.
A “dirty” baseball player, but a winner. The ultimate accolade within gringo pragmatism.
