Carlos Slim may have built his $60bn fortune in telecommunications, property and retail, but the Mexican billionaire has ink in his veins.

His mother, Linda Hel, would tell him stories when he was a boy in Mexico City of how her father, Jos, brought the first Arabic printing press to South America and published Mexico’s first Arabic magazine. The publication set the family of Lebanese immigrants on the road to prosperity and influence. You could even say it was the foundation of their fortune.

Today, more than a century after the first copies of that magazine rattled off the hand-driven presses, Slim is returning to his roots. Last week, the billionaire extended a $250m loan to the New York Times through two companies he controls to help it to cover debt repayments. Less than six months ago, he spent millions more building a 6.9% stake in America’s most-prized newspaper company. His repeated multi-million-dollar injections of cash, which have made him the second-biggest shareholder in the New York Times after the founding Sulzberger family, have set tongues wagging in the newsroom that there soon may be a new owner in town.

Rupert Murdoch. a few blocks north of the New York Times in the News Corporation building, is watching Slim’s growing stake in the newspaper with interest. The last thing Murdoch needs is a stronger New York Times, more able to do battle with his recently purchased and newly invigorated Wall Street Journal

Although struggling financially and under pressure from institutional shareholders, the Times already has a nationwide distribution network and is considered the only truly nationally available quality daily paper in America. USA Today is available nationwide but lacks the influence and gravitas of the Grey Lady, as the Times is known. The Wall Street Journal is available in many markets — and with more than 2m daily sales has a much larger circulation than the New York Times, with 1.6m — but is a long way from its goal of being a real national with broad appeal.

The New York Times’s troubles are many. The company has more than $1.1bn of debt, advertising revenues are falling fast, circulation is in decline, and angry shareholders seem constantly to be at the gate demanding management take drastic action.

Who can blame them? New York Times shares have lost more than 60% of their value in the past year alone, and more than 80% of their value since 2004. But what can management do? The dual threats of the internet and a declining interest in reading are nothing new. The Times has built one of the most impressive web presences of all global newspapers and has the data to show it is one of the most popular in the world. But its online success has done little to improve the company’s financial performance.

With the advertising outlook unlikely to improve any time soon, the Times needs someone with deep pockets to step in to save the day — and it has found that saviour in Slim.

He is a man who rarely talks about his investments, and he has not indicated whether he has ambitions any greater than his current minority stake. The loan, for example, could be said to be a prime example of his opportunism and nothing more. The $250m line of credit — extended by Slim’s finance house Banco Inbursa and his property company Inmobiliaria Carso — is a savvy deal that stands to reap him more than $35m a year in interest payments plus more shares in the Times by way of some handily crafted warrants. The deal is so good that Slim is certainly earning enough from the Times’s debt to make up for the millions he is losing on his equity investment in the company.

Slim, 67, made his first fortune in 1990 when he bought the state telephone operator Telfonos de Mxico (Telmex) in a privatisation. He also owns Amrica Mvil, the biggest mobile phone operator in South America. Amrica Mvil’s reach is vast, especially since it signed a joint venture with Yahoo to provide mobile internet to 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. He also owns interests in restaurant and retail chains in Mexico alongside an industrial conglomerate and a budget airline.

He has one of the largest collections of art in the world, housed in Mexico City’s Museo Soumaya, which is named after his late wife. But, despite owning the largest collection of Rodin sculptures on Earth, Slim shuns extravagance. Much Like Warren Buffett, he has lived in the same modest house for 30 years, insists that his six children work for a living, does not own a jet or a yacht and has driven the same beaten-up car for as long as anyone can remember.

He does have his detractors, though, who claim he is a monopolist, pointing to Telmex’s 90 per cent control of the domestic telephone market and Amrica Mvil’s continental ubiquity. Critics also point out that his $60bn was amassed on the backs of a workforce earning an average per capita income of $6,800 a year.

Indeed, his fortune equals 7% of Mexico’s annual economic output. If Buffett’s wealth was in the same proportion to the United States’ gross domestic product, he would be worth $874bn rather than $62bn.

Slim’s interests south of the border are so far-reaching that it is said you cannot get through a day in Mexico City without paying at least one peso to him.

But there are signs that Slim, who has as much power and influence as it is possible to amass in Mexico, is increasingly turning his attention to the United States — and his targets appear to be some of the icons of Wall Street and Main Street.

The crash in the markets and the economic downturn have provided him with greater and more diverse opportunities. In recent months he has invested $150m in Citigroup shares and amassed an 18.3% holding in luxury department store Saks Fifth Avenue — a stake so big that it forced the board to trigger its poison pill defence against a takeover.

But the New York Times is said to be his true prize. A majority stake in the newspaper publisher, coupled with his Mexican telecoms and internet interests, would give him a formidable launch pad in US media.

If he is prepared to stick by the Sulzbergers, help them weather the current storm and get to the next stage in news media modernisation, the paper might just stand a chance of beating Murdoch on the national stage and stopping the Wall Street Journal’s advances.

Without him — or someone else with equally deep pockets and grand ambitions — the old Grey Lady doesn’t have a hope.