Investing

Billionaire Bill Gates Owns Way More Than You Think

Austin Smith

Published: December 2, 2024 9:24 am

Key Points:

• Although he sold most of his Microsoft shares, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) still has a $160 billion net worth.
• Gates uses Cascade Investments, which owns interests in sectors such trash collection ( Republic Services) and agricultural (Deere & Co.), therefore moving the emphasis from tech to more conventional industries
• Also: take this retirement readiness quiz to see if you’re ahead of behind (sponsor)

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Transcript:

[00:00:00] Doug: Well, in the net worth world, let’s look at Bill Gates. So Bill Gates was the co founder of Microsoft, 1975 dropped out of Harvard, was the CEO until 2000 when he handed it over to Steve Ballmer. He has now just gone past the 160 billion mark. Now, the fascinating things about Gates is, is that Gates has sold most of his Microsoft stock or given it away.

[00:00:26] Doug: So the mill bill and Melinda Gates foundation got about 40 billion worth it. He now is a mini Warren Buffett. He’s still got about 1 percent of the shares in Microsoft. Microsoft’s market cap, I think now is about 2 trillion. So that’s still a pretty good chunk as has some nice value to it. He owns pieces of a large number of public companies through something called cascade, which yeah, that’s his

[00:00:55] Lee: fund or his family office or whatever you want to call it.

[00:00:58] Lee: Yeah. It’s been his

[00:01:00] Doug: Berkshire Hathaway and he has a lot of private investments in some. Which are in early stage startups, but for about 20 years, he was the richest man in the world. Most years. Yeah, he was. Now you’ve got Musk has passed and Bezos has passed him. not a lot of people have, but I think it’s okay with him.

[00:01:25] Doug: Well,

[00:01:27] Lee: he’s trying to be a little altruistic and all that and he like him and Buffett are big buddies and, exchange money back and forth between their, I think Buffett’s going to give a ton of his money to the mill, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or a big chunk of it. So, I mean, Gates has been a, odd tech bedfellow to some degree because he’s just now his hands are in so much other stuff around the world and climate change and this and that.

[00:02:00] Lee: And it’s been an interesting thing to watch him because I mean, face it, he hit the ball out of the park and, forever changed, the world from the operating system standpoint. And, he’s still sitting pretty, I mean, cascade owns things like Republic Services, the of the garbage guy.

[00:02:23] Doug: So, and they, and they, he owns deer. He owns, so think about this. Mr. High Tech, really the poster boy of modern high technology. He really is more than jobs. He owns a bunch of waste management stock and he owns beer. So he owns like he owns gasoline powered stuff. I guess he soured on tech and said, let’s just go.

[00:02:51] Doug: I want to go back one full century in terms of what I make money on. So we’ve got Bill Gates

[00:02:57] Lee: Well, he’s been an interesting person and of course we’ll go down in history He is one of the greatest innovators of all time, but I think he’s got he’s got awfully tied into the globalist group and There’s a lot of people that don’t care for the globalist group, these like look let we can run our own stuff We don’t need instructions from europe or whatever.

[00:03:19] Lee: So I think he may be a little close to that But when you got 165 bill who cares