March 14, 2007
Making money the old fashioned way...
To many Mexicans, who make Slim richer with nearly every phone call or trip to the mall, his rise shows their businessmen can run world-class companies. He's widely praised for turning Telmex -- once notorious for taking months or years to install a phone line -- into a modern, professional operation.But he also has kept phone rates high in a country where the minimum wage is about 50 cents an hour, and his success inspires anger among Mexicans who resent the concentration of wealth in the hands of the nation's relatively tiny elite.
"Why should we want a few people to hoard all the wealth, if the majority of Mexicans don't have enough to eat and 30 million Mexicans live on less than 22 pesos ($2) a day?" thundered former leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador after Slim's jumped to No. 3 on Forbes' list of billionaires announced last week.
Now worth an estimated $49 billion, the 67-year-old Slim is the son of a Lebanese father who built a small family fortune from retailing.
Slim's Telefonos de Mexico SA controls more than 90 percent of the nation's fixed phone lines and made $15.9 billion in 2006; his America Movil SA controls about 70 percent of cell phone service in Mexico and made $21.6 billion.
Carlos Slim is the worlds third richest man because he's gouging Mexican consumers. It's not skill, it's greed. If Mexico is ever going to drag itself into the first world, they have got to break up monopolies like that enjoyed by Mr. Slim.
And we have to be ever vigilant against monopolies here in the US.
Posted by mcblogger at March 14, 2007 09:16 AM
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