Although there is no confirmed amounts(obviously), a lot of people feel that Putin is the world's richest man with all the Russian money has stashed away to personal accounts
Before the fiscal cliff, WMT moved their dividend pay date forward by a few days so that the Waltons could pay 2012 cap gains on their dividend. They saved over 100 million in tax on ONE single dividend. This level of wealth is almost beyond comprehension.
(http://money.cnn.com/gallery/investing/2012/12/21/fiscal-cli...)
Well, had Microsoft not sold their "share" of loan to AAPL, they would have held a good chuck ~ 18.1 million shares [1]. Based off the AAPL splits, today those shares would have been 10 times more in count and 100 times more in price.
I actually feel really good about this. I like Bill. I think he tries hard to figure out the right way to spend his fortune. Glad to see he's back on top.
These lists are pretty arbitrary. They don't include more than $32 trillion hidden in off shore accounts. Putin, Gaddafi, Mubarak, and other third world dicators have many trillions stashed away. That is not even to count the monarchs who practically own entire countries.
Although I think people superestimate the wealth of some leaders (like Putin and Khadaffi when he was alive), there is some people much wealthier than Bill Gates.
I met once a guy that worked for some banks that handled middle-east money, and he said it was not uncommon to see some accounts moving around numbers with a crazy amount of zeroes, although he didn't knew what was personal money, what was family money, and what was company money, the amount of money flow still was much, much more than what western people move... but middle easterns don't care about disclosing it.
I agree, even a billion dollars, as free cash (as opposed to illiquid property holdings) is mind boggling. At IMF .9% interest rates that is $25,000 a day you would have to spend just to spend off the interest income.
I vividly remember the BBC reports about the US government flying planes filled with pallets of cash into Iraq - apparently $12 billion in cash was flow in:
Oh, I bet you could find something to amuse yourself. I would go with building my own city (can I get to work in ND every day in only a t-shirt) and seeing if my theory of nodal sprawl with high speed rail actually happens.
Oh, the couple of billion for Cancer Research, Brain Research, American Indian College Fund, and OpenBSD Foundation would be fun. Also doing a better OLPC.
We all have dreams of what we could do, its another matter of if those dreams would stay with us at that level.
- Bill Gates only owns about $13Billion of Microsoft stock directly.
- Over half of his net worth is in Cascade Investment LLC, a private investment fund run by Michael Larson. Mr Larson appears to be singularly responsible for Bill Gates' return to the top.
- The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is worth over $42 Billion, and is not included in Bill Gates' net worth
This list is static and not really useful given the swings in net worth of people. A far better and modern list is the bloomberg billionaires index, it is updated nearly daily.
Several friends of mine work at the Gates Foundation up here in Seattle and they comment a lot about the pressure they're under to GIVE AWAY the Gates' money faster. There's a running "joke" internally there (Gates himself does not find it funny and puts a lot of pressure internally on the folks responsible) that it's been nearly impossible to outspend Gates' financial gains as his own wealth keeps growing too fast.
This seems to fly in the face of the approach that Bill and Melinda have publicly claimed to have taken. Instead of "writing a big check" they're managing (very directly it seems) the allocation of funds to effective and worthwhile programs.
There may internal pressure to "give money away" but I doubt many have the freedom to start writing checks for ...anything.
Despite the internal commentary, which is mostly in jest, spending arbitrarily is going to get you fired pretty quick. But there is still a metric ton of pressure to find the right things to spend money on, and they struggle to do so in a lot of cases.
It's interesting to think about from an entrepreneurial perspective, that The Gates Foundation has plenty of capital to "invest" but the companies and programs are often not mature enough to warrant massive grants. There might be a ton of small NGOs doing awesome work all over the world, and they can take small grants (XX,000-XXX,000), but imagine what a nightmare it becomes for them if given the burden of tens of millions of dollars all the sudden. Money solves a lot of problems in the nonprofit world, but sudden cash infusions can often create a lot of bizarre problems.
And on the other side, even if The Gates Foundation gives thousands of six figure grants out, that's not going to make a dent in the overall pool of cash.
I wonder if an element of the foundation could be helping to scale or "staff up" these NGO's to be able to scale/deal with an influx of funding?
Obviously, "staffing up" is time intensive, but I would think they would need an alternative approach if finding worthy organizations becomes difficult.
I do think there is a pretty big incentive now for really smart people to work on the world's most important problems (disease, famine, poverty, education, etc) knowing there is a lot of capital to back it up. I know internally at TGF they've been working to market their grant programs better to encourage more young "startup" companies apply.
I got the impression more that the Gates' were eager to devote more money to the foundation, and the hurry is placed on finding worthwile ways to spend that money, rather than literally 'give this to anyone who will take it!'
It's not surprising. The GF is paid for by disbursing a set % of the endowment's value each year. Obviously the people managing the endowment only have one goal which is to keep it growing.
He should set up a website, enter your bank details (and maybe some unique personal information), click submit and it sends you a randomised sum of money, once.
Heck, make the proviso that it signs you up to his annual Gates notes for life ;-)
Also note that putting that kind of money anywhere creates so much market impact in practice that the gains diminish considerably.
E.g. SPY, the most active S&P500 index (also the single most heavily-traded U.S. stock), had a total dollar volume of $275B for all of 2014. Buying billions' worth of it, even over long periods, would drive the price up in the process and make further purchases more costly.
There is likely a lot of reasons why investing billions of dollars is not comparable to millions. You stop becoming a participant in markets and become an influencer. I am sure there would be an issue with investing $76 billion in treasuries too.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family
[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2014/05/20/what-ever-became-of-microsoft...
That's a lot of money.
I met once a guy that worked for some banks that handled middle-east money, and he said it was not uncommon to see some accounts moving around numbers with a crazy amount of zeroes, although he didn't knew what was personal money, what was family money, and what was company money, the amount of money flow still was much, much more than what western people move... but middle easterns don't care about disclosing it.
I agree, even a billion dollars, as free cash (as opposed to illiquid property holdings) is mind boggling. At IMF .9% interest rates that is $25,000 a day you would have to spend just to spend off the interest income.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
Oh, the couple of billion for Cancer Research, Brain Research, American Indian College Fund, and OpenBSD Foundation would be fun. Also doing a better OLPC.
We all have dreams of what we could do, its another matter of if those dreams would stay with us at that level.
So how does he keep getting wealthy?
- Over half of his net worth is in Cascade Investment LLC, a private investment fund run by Michael Larson. Mr Larson appears to be singularly responsible for Bill Gates' return to the top.
- The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is worth over $42 Billion, and is not included in Bill Gates' net worth
http://www.wsj.com/articles/this-mans-job-make-bill-gates-ri...
Why his net worth keeps increasing?
http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2015-02-27/aaa
Kind of a funny thought.
There may internal pressure to "give money away" but I doubt many have the freedom to start writing checks for ...anything.
It's interesting to think about from an entrepreneurial perspective, that The Gates Foundation has plenty of capital to "invest" but the companies and programs are often not mature enough to warrant massive grants. There might be a ton of small NGOs doing awesome work all over the world, and they can take small grants (XX,000-XXX,000), but imagine what a nightmare it becomes for them if given the burden of tens of millions of dollars all the sudden. Money solves a lot of problems in the nonprofit world, but sudden cash infusions can often create a lot of bizarre problems.
And on the other side, even if The Gates Foundation gives thousands of six figure grants out, that's not going to make a dent in the overall pool of cash.
Obviously, "staffing up" is time intensive, but I would think they would need an alternative approach if finding worthy organizations becomes difficult.
The old story that he always had a year of wages for every employee in the company liquid at Microsoft from day 1.
to put this in perspective, in January 2014 30 year treasuries were yielding 3.92% (although they have come down quite a bit since then).
also note that if bill gates had simply put all his money in an sp500 index fund last year he would have earned %13.69, or $10.8 billion
E.g. SPY, the most active S&P500 index (also the single most heavily-traded U.S. stock), had a total dollar volume of $275B for all of 2014. Buying billions' worth of it, even over long periods, would drive the price up in the process and make further purchases more costly.
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummar... (74 billion dollars traded in one day)