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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

> Elon Musk shared a post on his social network stating that Slim could have ties to criminal groups, and five minutes later, Carlos Slim canceled all business collaborations with Starlink in Latin America, which made Musk lose 7 billion US dollars.

Is there a source for this?

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> Is there a source for this?

For the claim that Slim had criminal ties? No, not really.

The immediate source was this tweet, which asserted, without any clear basis, that Slim has "significant ties to the drug cartels in Mexico": https://x.com/wallstreetmav/status/1882255277551972619

The linked NYT article in the reply-to was https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/world/americas/mexico-car... (archived: https://archive.ph/6Sn0Y), which doesn't mention Slim at all.

Here is Elon's quote of that tweet with the monocle emoji https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1882301283090190520

Do you think anyone does serious business in Mexico and doesn't run into the cartels?

I get some animal farm vibe reading this. I'm looking at the US gov and I'm looking a the cartels, and I can't figure out which one is which. The way this US gov is operating, they pretty much operate likes cartels "we are the boss, you stfu and you do as we say, or else".

American car companies?

Lol, what do you guys think the cartels are ?

Probably not possible to be the richest person in Mexico without some incidental connection or accidental involvement with organised crime.

So it really hardly matters, unless you get a lot of details.

I don't doubt that's often the case, but there's still a big difference between a general statement and a specific claim.

> Probably not possible to be the richest person in Mexico without some incidental connection or accidental involvement with organised crime.

Honestly this sounds like a cartoonish understanding of a country

Can you say the same about the US ?

Where does Elon get his psychodelics ?

Did Silk Road use AWS ?

I haven’t seen any clear connection. maybe it links to this article that is claiming it’s bad to represent cartels as terror orgs as some loose indicator it is slim trying to push that narrative to benefit the cartels since I did see he owned 17% share in NYT?

The cancellation of business with Starlink was announced in the Mexican media weeks ago. See this article in Spanish:

https://expansion.mx/tecnologia/2025/02/26/america-movil-cor...

That article is dated 26 Feb 2025, not weeks ago.

From the article:

> "It is better to put our towers, plants and optical fiber to link them," said the business magnate in his press conference held on February 10.

> Two days later, Daniel Hajj, CEO of América Móvil, confirmed the decision in a conference call with analysts, where he announced an investment of 22 billion dollars over the next three years to expand its infrastructure. With this move, the possibility of a collaboration with SpaceX was ruled out.

It's like mush lives in a glass house and just hangs out online all day chunking rocks. I don't know Carlos Slim so maybe this is or maybe it isn't the pot calling the kettle black. Unless someone has evidence that can paint Carlos Slim with the same brush as the one mush uses on himself then I tend to believe that Slim's friends are a lot less shady than mush's.

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