Bill Gates’ Fortune Dropped $35 Billion This Year

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Key Points

  • Gates’ Wealth Has Been Hit By His Sell-Off Of Microsoft

  • Gates Has Also Paid A Large Divorce Settlement

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Bill Gates’ Fortune Dropped $35 Billion This Year

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Bill Gates’ fortune has dropped $35 billion this year to $124 billion. Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer, who Gates hired, has a net worth of $172 billion now. That’s up by $26 billion in 2025. One secret is that Ballmer kept his Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT | MSFT Price Prediction) stock. Gates has given a lot of his money away. Ballmer owns 4% of Microsoft. Gates owns less than 1%

Gates has given billions of dollars to the Gates Foundation .He plans to give almost all the rest of his money to the organization between now and 2045. His former “partner” in the foundation was his wife Melinda French Gates. There are several rumors about how much she got in the breakup. Most numbers are between $25 billion and $30 billion.

Gates has diversified well beyond his Microsoft holdings. Many of these investments are held by his Cascade Investment LLC. Among these are cloud computing company Fungible, GitHub, Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B) stock, high end Four Season hotels, and at some point, FedEx (NYSE: FDX), UPS, Deere, and a number of private companies.

Gates is also the largest owner of farmland in America at 242,000 acres. Some of this may be due to his concerns about global health and food insecurity. He said, “The agriculture sector is important. With more productive seeds we can avoid deforestation and help Africa deal with the climate difficulty they already face.” He could also be interested in the biofuels sector.

Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, Forbes reported, from 1995 to 2017, excluding 2008 and 2010-2013. This period covers 18 out of 23 years on that calendar with a consecutive period from 1995 to 2007

Gates is well behind the current global weather leader, Elon Musk, whose number stands at $361 billon

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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