From today’s New York Post:
March 14, 2007 — Carlos Slim, the Mexican tycoon just a hair from being the world’s richest man, scoffed yesterday at Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for “playing Santa Claus” to cure poverty’s ills.
Slim climbed on his meanie soapbox just days after his $49 billion fortune was ranked by Forbes as the third-richest behind that No. 1 Gates and No. 2 Buffett – only a few billion shy from eclipsing them both.
“Poverty isn’t solved with donations,” he said at the unveiling of his own health care initiative. Slim continued that building good businesses do more for society than “going around like Santa Claus.”
Slim wants to build huge hospitals in northern Mexico where the U.S. can ship tens of thousands of Medicare patients for health care that can be delivered at much cheaper costs.
Slim was unimpressed at how Buffett and Gates vowed late last year to combine their entire fortunes into the world’s largest foundation to do good works.
“Our concept is more to accomplish and solve things, rather than giving,” Slim said.
Slim, 67, has expanded his empire of telecom and energy assets faster than any of the other top billionaires of the world, growing at 64 percent last year.
Interesting. And very Randian-sounding. Could he be a celebrity Ayn Rand fan?
UPDATE: Then again, maybe not. Reader Ashley March at the Cato Institute writes:
According to our Director of the Center for Global Liberty and Proserity, Ian Vasquez, far from understanding Objectivism, “Slim is the biggest hypocrite and worst mercantilist in Latin America. Heâ??s one of the reasons mexico has not grown faster; among other things, heâ??s ruthlessly maintained a telecom monopoly in mexico, making it a huge bottleneck in the economy and one of the most expensive places to make calls.”