Text by Sarah Phelan
Is “Slim” really Mr. Slim’s real name? And who is this scary-sounding guy, anyways? News junkies should probably be asking these questions now that Carlos Slim Helú has loaned $250 million to the New York Times, and may ultimately take over the financially troubled company, which reportedly is $1.1 billion in debt.
When I first read Mr. Slim’s name, coupled with the phrase “the Mexican billionaire,” I thought there was no way this could be his real name. It had to be a nickname, a scary one at that, evoking comic book-style images in which a burly mobster darkens the newspaper’s door with a long shadow, a cloud of cigar smoke and the threat that “Mr. Slim intends to slim down the newsroom, starting with your left pinkies, if he doesn’t see some profits soon.”
But while it’s true that Mr. Slim is looking for a 10 percent profit at the Times—a scary sounding goal for reporters in an increasingly shrinking media world —it turns out Slim really is Mr. Slim’s real name, albeit a modification of the name of his Lebanese father, Youssif Salim, a Maronite Catholic, who emigrated to Mexico at the tender age of 14.
Upon reaching Mexico, Mr. Slim’s father changed his name from Youssif Slim to Julián Slim Haddad, adding his mother’s surname, Haddad, for good measure, as per Mexican-naming customs.
As the perhaps future king of the NYT, Slim, 69, already exerts influence on the telecommunications industry in Mexico and much of Latin America, and may well be the richest man on Earth, with a net worth of $60 billion, having possibly surpassed Warren Buffet in the recent global economic turmoil. All of which makes me fear that there is a fat chance that Slim will be suffering expanding word counts at the New York Times, any time soon.