Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock
just a small portion of Why Bill Gates is Richer than You
by
Philip Greenspun
| Tue Nov 26 12:26:19 EST 2024 |
|---|
| Microsoft Stock Price: | $418.79
|
| Bill Gates's Wealth: | $949.15 billion
|
| Losses to Divorce Plaintiff: | $474.58 billion
|
| Legal Fees to Defend Divorce Lawsuit: | $0.10 billion
|
| Reimburse Divorce Plaintiff Legal Fees: | $0.15 billion
|
| Remainder after Divorce: | $474.33 billion
|
| U.S. Population: | 337,473,804
|
| Your Personal Contribution: | $2812.52
|
"If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to."
-- Old Irish Saying
Sources
- Population: U.S. Census Bureau
- N shares of Microsoft owned by Bill Gates: 1995 Microsoft Proxy Statement (141,159,990 shares adjusted for splits in December 1996, February 1998, March 1999, and February 2003)
- Microsoft Stock Price:
AlphaVantage
The Clock attempts to accurately display Bill Gates's wealth,
not the value of his current holdings of Microsoft stock. We take as
a baseline of his wealth the shares of Microsoft that he held in 1995.
This may be an understatement because it doesn't include any investments he
purchased with sales of Microsoft shares sold prior to 1995. The
clock adjusts for the extraordinary $3.29 billion dividend that Bill
Gates received from Microsoft at the end of 2004.
What about shares sold subsequent to 1995? If Gates sold Microsoft
shares to purchase shares in cable TV companies, Corbis, or whatever,
we assume that these investments have performed about as well as
Microsoft. What about charity? Bill Gates is directly involved in
managing his charitable foundation. So he and his plaintiff still control the money
and it remains a form of wealth, e.g., available for Gulfstream charter.
The clock adjusts for the
divorce lawsuit filed by Melinda Gates by assuming that the
plaintiff gets half and that the defendant had to pay 100 percent of
the legal fees on both sides. (See Real World
Divorce for more on the process of American divorce litigation.)
How it Works
... is explained in somewhat simplified form, including source code,
in Chapter 10 of Philip and Alex's Guide
to Web Publishing. The clock was built back
in 1995 as an example for MIT students of the future of Web service
design: servers that combine information and services from other
servers
(see http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/teaching-software-engineering). Ironically this approach to distributed computing was ignored by most of the rest of the world except for one
company: Microsoft! Microsoft .NET
was the first environment with extensive support for building applications like this
wealth clock.
The original source
code is available and is intended primarily for Computer Science
majors working through the textbook Software
Engineering for Internet Applications.
Index
philg@mit.edu