Investing

Stocks Held by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

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After 27 years of marriage and more than two decades of philanthropy, the announced divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates has come as a surprise to most of us. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest in the United States and the second largest in the world, with an endowment approaching $50 billion. Only Denmark’s Novo Nordisk Foundation is larger, with an endowment of around $73 billion.

The Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 with the merger of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation. The former had been established by Bill Gates’s father and the latter was created by Bill and Melinda Gates in 1997. The foundation’s website notes that since 2000 it has spent $53.8 billion.

About half of the Gates Foundation’s endowment is invested in stocks. According to a federal filing made in February, the foundation’s largest holding is about $9.8 billion in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate founded and still managed by Warren Buffet.

Here’s a list of all the foundation’s equity holdings as of December 2020.

Name Ticker Value ($ Millions) Shares
Alphabet GOOGL 37.8 21,554
Alphabet GOOG 37.7 21,491
Amazon AMZN 98.5 30,230
Apple AAPL 133.0 1,002,088
Berkshire Hathaway BRK-B 9,762.7 42,104,399
Canadian National CNI 1,865.2 16,979,268
Caterpillar CAT 2,049.7 11,260,857
Coca-Cola FEMSA KOF 286.5 6,214,719
Crown Castle CCI 848.9 5,332,900
Ecolab ECL 944.7 4,366,426
FedEx FDX 785.4 3,024,999
Grupo Televisa TV 139.1 16,879,104
Liberty Global A LBTYA 51.3 2,119,515
Liberty Global C LBTYK 86.1 3,639,349
Liberty Latin America C LILAK 7.5 676,979
Liberty Latin America A LILA 3.1 276,443
Schrodinger SDGR 552.8 6,981,664
Twitter TWTR 14.8 272,420
UPS UPS 762.1 4,525,329
Walmart WMT 1,672.6 11,603,000
Wasste Management WM 2,197.5 18,633,672

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