From Bloomberg News:
Mexico's wealthiest person lost $5.1 billion in the wake of Donald Trump's stunning upset over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Carlos Slim, who is fifth-richest in the world, shed 9.2 percent of his fortune after the peso dove as much as 12 percent on the news.
What the Bloomberg article doesn't mention is that (as I reported back in September):
as of March 7, 2016, Carlos Slim Helu, of Mexico, controlled 17.4 percent of New York Times company stock, or 27,803,000 shares. At today's prices, that's worth about $344 million.
For comparison's stake, the entire Ochs-Sulzberger family, including the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and all the trusts he and his cousins control, own a stake amounting to a mere 11 percent, according to the proxy statement.
To be clear, I'm not saying that the Times opposed Trump because Slim told them to. Plenty of the reporters and editors there are college-educated liberal Upper West Siders or Park Slopers or other people who would be demgraphically or temperamentally opposed to Trump even if their newspaper weren't owned by a Mexican billionaire with a heavy personal financial stake in the outcome of the election. These reporters and editors also opposed George W. Bush, who supported NAFTA and comprehensive immigration "reform." But neither did the newspaper's ownership have any financial incentive to restrain the newspaper's over-the-top anti-Trump stance.
One of the lost opportunities of the election was the chance that a Trump libel lawsuit against the Times would have offered into discovery and disclosure of Mr. Slim's communications with Times ownership. It might be a fertile topic for investigation by Wikileaks.
And just to be clear, again, I have no problem with foreign ownership of or investment in American media companies. I think the Times did some fine reporting work in the past election cycle (for one example, see here). But readers should know what they are getting. If, say, some Russian billionaire owned 17% of Trump supporter Sean Hannity's TV or of Rush Limbaugh's radio business, you'd never hear the end of it from the New York Times.
Finally, I guess it is conceivable that, unbeknownst to Bloomberg News, Mr. Slim had some kind of trade or insurance that hedges or limits his exposure to peso-related currency risk.