PROFILE: Carlos Slim: A billionaire who does not keep Forbes' score

By Andrea Sosa Cabrios Mar 10, 2011, 21:30 GMT

Mexico City - Carlos Slim has an elephant's memory when it comes to numbers: he can recite without a blink the millions of dollars that his companies invest.

And yet he always plays down the figures about his own wealth published by the US magazine Forbes, which considers him the world's richest man.

At age 71, the Mexican tycoon who first stormed to the top of the list in 2010 is again on top of the world. And he not only beats the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett: he also surpasses himself, and by quite a bit.

Within just one year, Slim's fortune grew by 20 billion dollars. To put it graphically, this is almost double the funds that Mexico attracted in 2010 from tourism, for example. Now, the Mexican telecommunications tycoon has 74 billion dollars, according to Forbes.

'For me this is not a competition, least of all in this type of category. I'm not taking anything away with me when I die,' Slim once said, when asked what he thought of the list and about the fact of being so rich in a country with 50 million poor.

He says he owns the same real estate he always has, and he insists he has no houses or apartments outside Mexico. He says that his wealth depends more on the ups and downs of the stock market than on his own purchases in the fields of telecommunications, mining, infrastructure, finance and trade.

Slim, who owns Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex), America Movil and the Grupo Carso conglomerate, calls in reporters every year to talk about his plans, about the future, about the leap from an agrarian society to an industrial society, about baseball, about motorsport.

At the headquarters of his financial firm Inbursa, he sits in the middle of a long table, along with his children who manage his main companies and his advisors. His grandchildren, currently in high school, listen to him from the back of the hall, and they learn.

Some things annoy Slim, like being asked whether he bought Telmex for a pittance 20 years ago, or how he feels about being so rich in a country with so many poor. But he stands open to talk about anything, about his foundations, about his plans to create a Digital University.

With the help of a notebook or some photocopied pages, he goes over the past few months and talks about planned investment. The telecommunications tycoon uses no laptop computer or iPad as memory aides, and he does not use the Internet as he talks to reporters.

Slim, born in Mexico into a family of Lebanese descent, has just opened in Mexico City a new building for the Soumaya Museum. Named after his late wife, the mother of his six children, Mexican President Felipe Calderon described it as 'one of the world's most important art museums.'

The museum's new building stands in a complex that also houses apartments, shops and offices to hold all of Slim's firms. Construction took 800 million dollars.

Now he is immersed in a public fight with Televisa and TVAzteca, the two titans of Mexican television, over the enticing and lucrative businesses of television and phones.

Slim recently bought a building on New York City's Fifth Avenue, but he says it is only meant as investment. He has no plans to keep an apartment there.

'For me it's easier to arrive at a hotel,' he says. 'Two days, three days, and I'm gone.'

Former Spanish prime minister Felipe Gonzalez, US TV personality Larry King and Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez are among his friends, but little is known of Slim's private life.

It is unlikely that he will buy Forbes magazine to check the figures. Slim is busy with other things. This year, he is set to invest 8.3 billion dollars in his businesses. It remains to be seen what Forbes will say of that in its next list.

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