Mexican magnate Carlos Slim has an ambitious new year’s resolution. He wants to fold two of his major telephone companies — Telmex and Telmex Internacional — into his major international cellphone company, America Movil, in order to cut down on costs. The plan is already rankling analysts and regulators whose job is to keep a tycoon of Slim’s caliber somewhat in check. The Mexico City native is known as one of the top-top wealthiest individuals in the world. Right now, his rank at Forbes is third. Often, he is first.

Consolidating those companies won’t be easy for Slim. Already, competitors are gearing up for battle. So Slim, brilliant business strategist that he is, offered the people a festively packaged gift today. Just because.

At a sleek press conference inside his Telmex Institute in Mexico City’s historic downtown, Slim and several of his top corporate deputies announced a $10 billion-peso three-year investment plan to radically update Mexico’s “digital culture.” A separate multi-million-dollar initiative to fund genome research came on Tuesday.

The idea, Slim said, is to make Mexico more competitive in the abstract “human capital” sense with other ascendant economies — such as Brazil — whose successes in innovation have so far eluded his own country. Slim said his Telmex will:

A) Increase access to high-speed Internet across Mexico.

B) Open “digital libraries” where customers could check out laptops.

C) Expand Telmex data centers and “digital scholarships.”

D) Open an accredited Information Technology Institute to train 1,000 new professionals to find real-world solutions for the private sector.

E) Expand wireless Internet services to hundreds of schools, hospitals, bus terminals, airports, and restaurant chains.

Details were otherwise vague, and only time will tell how much of the initiative is actually delivered. So upon taking questions, Slim was pressed by Reuters about the America Movil plan. He said consolidation would not result in bundling of fixed and cellphone lines for Mexican consumers, then quipped: “We are in 18 countries and in 17 of them we have no legal problems.” The reference was to Mexican regulators who aggressively pursue his assets — unequally, some analysts say.

In person, even upon a podium, Slim seems like a no-nonsense sort of businessman, astute but not uptight, even-minded but not close-minded. Another analogy came to me as I watched him: “Like the sort of guy you wouldn’t mind having a beer with.”

Then again, they used to say the same thing about George W. Bush.

Attempting to merely fathom the reaches of this man’s wealth is disconcerting, especially in Mexico, where so many millions of people are so poor. Besides his dominance in the telecommunications market across Latin America, Slim has his hands deep in global retail, real estate, banking, air travel, and media.

Freakier still is his attitude on the matter. Slim once bristled at reporters, “I think it’s perverse to believe that there shouldn’t be strong companies in poor countries.” For more on that, last year’s lengthy New Yorker profile on Slim is helpfully summarized here.

On Wednesday, Slim spoke grandly about the “end” of “agricultural economies” and the need for economies of “ideas,” the end of “monolithic power” and the need to embrace a new age of “competition and globalization.” Slim indeed pumps millions every year into infrastructure, development, and philanthropy. But it’s evident that in every move he makes, the goal is not about positive publicity, being a good citizen, or even being a good Mexican.

Step by step, the expansion and care of Carlos Slim’s empire is about little else than … Carlos Slim’s bottom line.

* Image above via Wikipedia.

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