Melbourne, July 19: Mexican mobile phone mogul Carlos Slim may be the world''s richest man, but he’s a simple man at heart.
Slim, 70, limits his monthly salary to 24,000 dollars and travels in a Chevrolet Suburban, according to his latest biography.
The Mexican tycoon started his business career at 10, selling sweets and drinks to his family and later made his name with aggressive investments during crises.
"Unlike aristocrats, the jet set or the monarchy, he''s extremely simple," biographer Jose Martinez told a foreign new agency as a new edition of his 2002 book, ''Carlos Slim, unpublished portrait,'' was set for release across Latin America.
According to his biographer, Slim''s fortune far exceeds the amount calculated by Forbes.
The fifth of six children - three boys and three girls -- Slim was born into a well-off family, including a Lebanese immigrant father, in Mexico City in January 1940.
The soft-spoken billionaire, who has studied civil engineering and later built up the telephone monopoly Telmex after acquiring it from the government in 1990, has invested more than US60 billion dollars (A68 billion dollars) in Latin America in the past 10 years.
"All this was done by a man who fixes his salary at 24,000 dollars a month and at the same time controls between 30 and 40 percent of the Mexican stock exchange," the Daily Telegraph quoted the biographer as saying.