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Bill Gates regains title of world's richest person as Microsoft stock hits five-year high
Bill Gates may be more philanthropic than ever since leaving the top job at Microsoft, but he still owns a ton of stock in the company, which today just so happened to close at a five-year high. As Bloomberg reports, that shift was finally enough to push Gates' net worth back above that of telecom mogul Carlos Slim, who took the title of "world's richest person" away from Gates way back in 2007. As things stand now, Gates has some $72.7 billion to his name, while Slim stands at $72.1 billion. A situation that offers no material for puns whatsoever.
CFC backtracks on Slim's near-billion dollar fine in Mexico, lays out other terms and conditions
The ongoing kerfuffle between Mexico's Federal Competition Commission and Carlos Slim's America Movil (Telcel's parent company) took a drastic turn earlier today. According to the CFC, a deal has been reached with Slim's telecom outfit that, among other things, will revoke the 11,989,000,000 pesos fine (about $1 billion dollars) imposed back in 2011. That being said, the wealthiest man on the globe isn't completely off the hook, as America Movil's been given five new demands that must be adhered to. Among these are reducing the current per-minute interconnection rates from .95 to .36 pesos, sharing the Telcel waves with other companies in the country and routinely providing the CFC with extensive details to prove the aforementioned requirements are being followed. Should America Movil not live up to its end of the deal, the Mexican regulator could hit Carlos Slim & Co. with a fine of up to eight percent of Telcel's annual revenue -- which, needless to say, is a heck of a lot of cash.
Mexico's CFC deems Telcel 'too dominant' in mobile call termination, more regulations coming
Things could be getting a tad bit messy for the world's richest man, Carlos Slim, as Mexico's CFC (or Federal Competition Commission) has ruled one of his companies holds too much power in a key wireless sector. The CFC's beef with Telcel isn't exactly novel; earlier this year the antitrust agency served the phone outfit with an 11,989,000,000 pesos fine (around a $1 billion) for "monopoly practices." Telcel's latest troubles date back to 2011, when the CFC deemed the company "too dominant" in the mobile call termination game, and now it's taken a unanimous vote that'll allow it to implement "asymmetric" regulations on Telcel's service quality, charges and information. Not all is lost for Slim's carrier, however, since it could still appeal the CFC's decision.
Bill Gates: philanthropist, nerd, beer baron
Being the shrewd businessman that he is, Bill Gates has just invested a significant amount of money in one of the few products consumed during both good times and bad: alcohol. Actually Femsa, the Mexican brewery in which Gates now owns a $392 million stake through his Cascade Investment LLC fund, does a lot more than just brew booze: according to Reuters, it's also the world's second-largest Coke bottler as well as operator of Oxxo, Latin America's largest convenience store chain. When asked how he felt about the Microsoft founder moving in on his home turf, fellow billionaire Carlos Slim reportedly shrugged off the threat, boasting, "Not only am I a wealthier man than Mr. Gates, but he couldn't even make it through half a Power Hour with his nueva cerveza."
Carlos Slim to hook Mexico up with 'millions' of laptops
Carlos Slim, who is (debatably) the richest man on the face of the planet, has recently pledged to do some good with all that fundage, and we'd say that donating "250,000 low-cost laptops to children by the end of the year and as many as one million in 2008" is a fine start. Noting "digital education" as the key for turning much of Mexico around, he is aiming to "initially put the laptops in libraries and schools" and hand them out to students afterwards. Moreover, he suggested that his company (Telmex) would be there to help set up wireless networks for the machines to connect to, and as if these plans were enormous enough, he's also looking to establish "early stimulation" preschools within four years to give "poor children training at a young age in math, language, and computers."[Via Wired]
Carlos Slim edges out Bill "Fatty Fat Fat" Gates as world's richest person
It was probably inevitable, with Bill Gates handing out his cash right and left, and Microsoft's stock in pretty much a holding pattern for most of the 2000's, but it's still sad to see our man Bill get knocked off the top spot on the "world's richest" list. His replacement is no stranger to tech though, Carlos Slim built his fortune in the Mexican telecom biz, and has amassed an estimated net worth of $67.8 billion, thanks to a surge in the shares of America Movil. Slim's fortune represents 8% of Mexico's gross domestic product, and whatever he lacks in geek cred he more than makes up on the streets with that entirely gangster name of his.[Thanks, Emiliano M]
Cellphones go silent as Mexico's biggest network fails
Millions Hundreds of millions of us could not get through the day without access to our beloved mobiles, so the scene in Mexico City this week when the Telcel wireless network went down must have been quite the frenzy, and even more than the mess that was caused by intermittent Cingular outages almost one year ago here up North. Millions of Mexican cellular customers has nothing but silence in the earpieces of all those handsets when Telcel's network, uh -- how do we put this nicely? -- crashed. The details of the network going down centered on a technical fault in western Mexico City, temporarily saturating the Telcel network, Mexico's largest wireless carrier with 40 million customers (a little smaller than Sprint Nextel's customer base here in the U.S.). The good news after the network went down in Mexico City was that it was soon back up, as service began returning just hours later. Service was 90% functional by late afternoon Tuesday.
