CARLOS SLIM IN MEXICO

“The power of the megarich does not stop at America's borders. As Chrystia Freeland writes in her 2012 book Plutocrats, ‘the rise of the 1 percent is a global phenomenon,’ with the world bifurcating into the rich and the rest. A website on the power elite could offer links to its international members. A page on Mexico's Carlos Slim, for instance, could point out that his fortune (estimated at more than $70 billion) is equal to about
6 percent of his country's total annual GDP [Gross Domestic Product], helping to make it one of the most unequal societies in the world.

“As a 2014 Oxfam briefing paper explained, most of Slim's wealth derives from his having gained near-
monopolistic control of Mexico's telecommunications sector when it was privatized twenty years ago. Over the
seventy years that Oxfam has spent fighting poverty around the world, the report stated, it has seen "first-hand

  how the wealthiest individuals and groups capture political institutions for their aggrandizement at the       expense of the rest of society." It's impossible to understand Mexico's many problems without taking into account Slim's dominance, yet he rarely appears in reports about that country. Earlier this year [2015], Slim more than doubled the number of shares he owns in The New York Times Company (to nearly 17 percent), making him its largest individual shareholder (though the Sulzbergers retain control). It's interesting to note that Slim rarely appears in the paper's news pages. On the surface, this seems a glaring conflict of interest.”

Massing, Michael, ‘How to Cover the One Percent,’ The New York Review, January 14, 2016, pp: 74-76.