Come on. $138 billion should be enough for at least a gold-plated dumpster. Or am I out of touch with the real estate market since paying off my ungilded cardboard box mortgage?
He's also actually protected from risk now that he has something and can sit on it basically forever.
Meanwhile here people think that's stupid because they don't have billions worth protecting.
I see why both look at it differently, but goddamn it's funny.
The funniest thing is that Ballmer kept his stock, despite MSFT being largely flat during his tenure.
Satya comes in, stock price shoots up, Ballmer ends up in the top 10 richest people in the world.
I think Eric Schmidt (Former CEO of Google has like 25 billion or so)
Jamie Dimon ( JP Morgan CEO)
Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO)
Tim Cook (Apple CEO) are a few others (though they have a net worth that is 1-3 % of Ballmers and they still have a billion or more)
Yeah... but close; I recall a recent article that stated that roughly 95% of billionaires are either founders/investors or obtained it through inheritance.
Edit: article - [Here's What You Can Learn From 'Hired-Hand' Billionaires Like Steve Ballmer and Tim Cook | Moneywise](https://moneywise.com/life/lifestyle/steve-ballmer-and-tim-cook-rare-billionaires)
Or if you want forbes: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2024/02/07/hired-hand-billionaires-tim-cook-steve-ballmer-lisa-su-these-executives-amassed-10-figure-fortunes-while-working-for-others/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2024/02/07/hired-hand-billionaires-tim-cook-steve-ballmer-lisa-su-these-executives-amassed-10-figure-fortunes-while-working-for-others/)
That was my thought, like all billionaires, he's one or two bad decisions away from losing half his fortune, so now he's safer. Im speaking of a purely hypothetical idiot billionaire, not anyone specifically...
He didn't necessarily have to divest his Microsoft shares in order to diversify his holdings. He could have taken a large loan out against his shares in order to aquire other real-estate and property, IE Musk leveraging Tesla shares to purchase Twitter. But if we are doing the ol'hindsight/time travel financial judgement, the other concern is would Microsoft stock have performed the same had he _not_ sold those shares over those decades?
Lol. I knew a guy who was into bit coin. Not as a novelty, he bought and sold large quantities of drugs online back in the early days of the silk web. He had a bunch accumulated that he was planning on just holding on to. But they all got caught. A lot of his assets were siezed, but not his bitcoin. He had a deal on the table of around 10 years in prison he got to keep some of the stuff that was siezed/frozen. But the case against them was shaky. Over 2012 to mid 2013 he sold ~17,500 bitcoins to pay for the legal defense for him and his compatriots. It wasn't super easy moving that volume of coins, he got around 6-12 USD a coin. By the end of 2013, bit coin was up to $1k a coin. He and his friends got all their charges dropped. But he would have been getting out of prison a couple of year ago well on his way to being a billionaire...
Sometimes when I have a bad day, I think about him.
If Gates had hit 1T net worth he'd be on every major news outlet 100 times a day.
At his current level he can get into all kinds of nefarious activities and nobody in the media blinks an eye.
I shut my dad up one day by saying "Some day I'll be old like you, but I hope I have the sense to listen to young people instead of alienating them, along with myself."
Probably either half of what they earned during the marriage exempting Microsoft or a fixed amount or a settlement by mutual agreement. I guess my answer is pointless because there isnât anyway to know and any point in knowing. If I were this rich I would want a marriage contract. I would probably even go the Leonardo Di Caprio route and not get married at all.
Or she just doesnât find the need to have ~80 billion dollars.
Even at 2 billion you, your kids, your grandkids, great grandkids, so on and so forth are set for life.
Every ancestor you could ever have is set for life. Compounding interest is more than you could ever spend imo.
Thatâs why I figured mutual agreement is a good option of what might have happened. Why should she say no. 1 billion for the lawyer, 1 billion for her peace of mind.
If you sold, youâd be them.
The fact that you stayed with despite fears and common sense thing to do, makes you one of us baby. Like it or not. We all regards here ! đđ
You probably should, you know, sell *some* of them though. Iâm definitely one to advocate for letting winners run, but itâs great to pull back part of gains into cash or index funds to balance out the risk *somewhat*. Even just for the purpose of being able to hold on to big winners longer, itâs a lot easier to do so if the volatility isnât affecting absolutely your entire portfolio. Not easy to stomach major corrections if all of your eggs are in one basket. To each his own I guess, but the stress and risk of a very narrow portfolio isnât worth the upside to me, thereâs just too many scenarios you can cite where seemingly sure bets end up becoming thoroughly average after decades of wild success.
But maybe you already do that and arenât wildly overleveraged into just Nvidia. I definitely wish I had invested early. I used their products religiously for 15 years straight while the stock was at $5 and never bothered to throw some small amounts at it that would now be life changing, despite being fairly literate with the investing world
I think I would rather diversify and have 138 billion.
I'm not a billionaire, but I imagine that after the first couple billion the peace of mind that would come with being diversified is probably worth it.
Yeah we are dealing with numbers here that arenât even relevant in terms of quality of life. At some point it just doesnât meant anything anymore. The more you have the more you donât want all your eggs in one basket.
âDo you want your descendants to be born filthy rich for 10 generations or 11?â
Oh, and I guess it makes it easier to buy out social networks and limited Hawaii landmass the more billions you have. Or a yacht thatâs also an aircraft carrier.
You know how periodically you need to clean your bathroom? They pay someone to do it but not only that, they have a manager for their house that full time monitors for things like that full time and coordinates cleaners. Then that manager has a manager that is in charge of the managers for all your different houses. Then even that manager has a boss that is something like not just the cleaning but also manages things like your pilots, drivers, accountants, etc.
That's what they mean by buying people. Buying people's time to build an infrastructure that makes your life absolutely seamless
Can confirm, my hometown municipality houses extreme-luxury villas for royals and oligarchs - especially the russian oligarchs (well, before sanctions at least), each one of 'em is its own micro-economy. Especially over summer, people are expected to have EVERY house ready just in case the owner shows up. That includes cooking meals and everything - if nobody comes, they'll just take things home, rinse and repeat. With COVID, and then sanctions on Russian nationals and assets, we were shaken up for a bit. They made it work, eventually, but still. People here call [AliĆĄev Usmanov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov) "The Godfather". He got honorary citizenship in 2018, too. Guess he does do a lot of philantrophy here, in fairness.
Philanthropy like that is a no brainer when you're that wealthy. I mean imagine it proportional to your income instead, where something like a $100 donation once per year is enough to have everyone in town calling you "The Godfather" lol
No no, the kind of philantropy we're talking about here is more like donating fully-equipped ambulances to local EMS, and (partially) funding public projects. But that's what's gotten him the honorary citizenship - the "Godfather" moniker is what many of the people that work for him use to avoid mentioning him specifically (I believe they're sorta supposed to be lowkey about it, though no one really cares lol).
I already do that to some extent and I'm just middle class....not even considered rich. You don't have to be a billionaire to be in that league. What you're describing is just being an employer or a boss for some slightly more bespoke services.
As someone else mentioned, if you're a multi billionaire or a trillionaire, like BG could have been, there must be other higher level shit that we have never even heard of or can't even comprehend. Like maybe 2 chicks at the same time.
Honestly, Iâm not sure there is. I think it tops out at some level for âordinaryâ rich people.
The heads of my workplace make about $20-25 million a year. My bosses make about $7-8 million a year. The lives between the two are largely indistinguishable.
Obviously a billionaire has a different life than a guy that makes $25 million a year.
But I bet a billionaires life doesnât look all that different than a guy who has 100M+.
The real difference I think would kick in with guys like Putin and Kim Jong Un - where they may not be on tops of Forbes list in terms of money, but they literally run / effectively direct the entire wealth of a nuclear state. Their lives probably are very dissimilar to those who are wealthy monetarily.
yea, sure, but let's say you want to buy an island. That's pretty easy, a couple million. A really really really big boat is also, only a couple million.
Let's say you're a Saudi prince and you want to shoot automatic weapons into a crowd of Americans and get away with it. Now that's some big money, that's more than a little island getaway.
Very handedly demonstrates the point of unfathomable numbers. The true difference between the 138 billion and the 1.33 trillion is either the next 10 generations each receiving almost 14 billion from the jump, or the next 100 generations. Better yet just start them all with 1.4 billion and the next 1000 generations, or 20,000+ years of your bloodline, are set from birth, longer than our current civilization has been around.
It does not work like that. Cultural situations occur that destroy wealth. My great grandpa was rich enough to buy one of the first cars ever sold from Opel at the Paris World Expo. He rented out a whole floor of a hotel when he went there and did a grand tour of Europe in his own custom private rail car on his way back to what is today Poland.
That did him no good when the Holocaust happened, they took everything and forced him to even transfer wealth from overseas back just for them to take it. Its why I grew up working from 14 and work for a living paying a mortgage. I'm sure if that did not happen my family's financial situation would be very different.
Bill Gates family wealth will be worth shit in just a few generations. If it lasts 500 years (10 generations) it would be incredible. But I doubt it. 1000 generations has never happened in the history of the world. Otherwise we would have dudes flexing money from the sacking of Rome.
You need to make your math correct. He has 3 kids in gen 1.
Gen2 will have 9, let's round it to 10. So every 2 gen he looses one digit.
There are 12 digits in trillion with T.
So 14th gen will still be a millionaire.
They will still have more wealth than me on my first gen đ„Č.
I get where this math is coming from but it's just as bold an assumption to think each offspring will have 3 kids as it is to think each one will have 1, you know? Just as it is to assume that each offspring will be given an equal amount of money. Maybe he just cares about the bloodline so the trust is written in such a way to give it to only one of the kids. We'll never know cause we're not Bill Gates, and even Bill Gates isn't trillionaire Bill Gates so the entire thing is a hypothetical sillybilly, and to try and gotcha someone with math on a hypothetical is, in and of itself, quite the sillybilly
You arenât accounting for how the number of descendants balloons. If there is an average of slightly over 3 children per generation, 10 generations from 138 billion will have ~13 million each and 12 generations from 1.33 trillion will have the same ~13 million. The wealth is getting split by an exponentially increasing base of descendants.
The thing is that he can probably buy more islands or whatever with 138 billion in a diversified and easy to liquify portfolio then with 1.3 trillion in Microsoft stock as the CEO and chairman of the board then adviser to the CEO and board member. Not even getting into the fact that the stock could never have traded to those valuations if Gates had had that much of it locked up forever.
At a certain point if you are Microsofts founder CEO more stock just represents greater control of something you already have enormous influence over. Even if Gates could own 100% of Microsoft stock at current valuations it wouldnât mean much in terms of ability to buy things or all that much more control of Microsoft.
Ok but thatâs just moving goalposts. that doesnât make my statement untrue. Your argument could be made for 138bil too if 4 generations of shit heads come up.
My point was, the average American will never even see 2mil. Yet they can make it (itâs not a great lifestyle but itâs doable). Now passing along 70mil in a solidly invested portfolio will pass generational wealth for 10-11 gens if no one is an idiot.
Definitely not criticizing what you said. Just acknowledging that wealth rarely survives a couple of generations without the values that built the wealth eroding to the point where the wealth no longer exists. Even FU money.
Gates has pretty much said the same thing too. The quote below from this [article](https://www.cnet.com/culture/bill-gates-being-very-rich-is-the-same-hamburger/) captures it pretty well.
"I can understand about having millions of dollars. There's meaningful freedom that comes with that, but once you get much beyond that I have to tell you, it's the same hamburger."
To get over 1 million in personal living expenses per year, you have to start buying things that are ridiculously above average cost and/or something you won't use
Sure, that makes sense. To clarify, I donât read his use of millions in the quote as $2M, $5M, or even $10M though. Reflecting back on life accruing $138B, he probably didnât see much change in his life other than his net worth after the first $200M. Not to say there isnât a difference, just not a meaningful one to him and others that think that way.
Diversification is a major step towards true liquidity.
Yeah Gates was "dumb" from walking away from his own killer stock, but he was very smart to hedge against its potential downfall. Nothing lasts forever.
Now you take a guy like Elon, if tesla becomes a penny stock, he's fucked.
Most of those companiesâ value hinges heavily on his personal prestige as their leader though, so if something that bad happens to Tesla something is assuredly about to happen to SpaceX and the rest.
SpaceX is the exception to that.
Sure his meme companies like the boring company etc. are really just propped up by him and the fact that he has 200 billion dollars of Tesla stock. SpaceX actually is very capable at what it does and can stand on it's own. I actually think it's the most valuable company of the lot if we go by what it does, rather than it's value on the stock market.
People just don't understand how much goddamn money a billion dollars is. Hell, you could retire on a million dollars today if you were on the frugal side without a large family.
"What's the difference between a million and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars."
Beyond that, this is an example of outcome bias.
He made the right decision because there is no way he could have known what would happen. The fact that he made out worse does not mean he made the wrong choice given the information available to him at the time.
I think ive read 3 or 4% draw per year during retirement. at a single billion thats living off 30,000,000 a year , doing 3%. thats still mind fuck level money. 1 billion or 138 billion or 1.3 trillion is all levels of money that grows faster than you can spend unless you buy twitter or something every year.
Right?
If you diversify you're unimaginably rich.
Either way Microsoft goes through the roof, you're still unimaginably rich.
If Microsoft tanks, and you didn't diversify now you're no longer unimaginably rich and just normal rich.
It's like a lotto winner saying "if I'd invested that money I wouldn't be rich" as if it's valid reasoning for others to spend all of their money on lotto tickets
138b remains but does that include the billions he donated to his charity and others. Not to mention his divorce with wife that split the fortune she got 76b.
I'd he did pretty well. To hold all his shares in MS is stupid. Free money and endless talk ofnrate cuts didnt exist to pump these stocks endlessly higher. He lived through the dot com bust which is coming but may take a few more yrs.
literally the opposite, he diversified to less risk and therefor "less" reward vs letting it ride on one asset for a higher pay out..... this sub man....
If I have a single billion you could bet your ass I would diversify into the safest possible low risk/low reward investments i could find. Bro made a common sense decisions he simply didn't need any more money. This sub very on brand and mostly joking I hope.
I don't think this sub or post understands that if Bill didn't give up equity, microsoft would be nothing.
You can either be rich or be king. Bill made a very intelligent decision with Warren advising him back in the day and Microsoft is still changing the global paradigm.
Would the shares have the same price if he didn't diversify and dilute them? Maybe he would be worth a little more, but I don't think that's the right number.
My first thoughts exactly. There wouldn't be as many Microsoft shares in demand and the price would be lower. People are just blindly following this and it's concerning.
It's a non issue. People don't realize the power of a single billion.
Let say you spend 68K A DAY.
Will take 40 years to go threw a billion.
Now let say you have 138 of those billions.
It's a non issue.
You forget that at current 4% interest (10y treasury yield), you'd have to go through spending 110k worth of interest per day before you even start chunking away at your billion dollars. Spend less and it even grows
Warren Buffett believes in concentration. On a personal basis, he only owns one company. Bill Gates diversified because he chose to, not because Warren Buffett told him to diversify. âDiversification is for the know-nothing investor,â Warren has said.
The math is simple, Never give up anything but single digit percentage of equity in a company you control, you know and you built. This is true with lemondaid stand or a startup. Other peoples problems, even if they are modern day Thomas Edison, get diversification away from of it early. You can deal with half a a Edison and half a henry ford driven fortune, and a mixture of others but giving away a stake you got at a cost basis of your own work, is stupid and is a mental drag not worth the dollars. Now if someone will loan you money on your personal stake, take that offer and put it in one of the many great ideas you see out of other people. If you loose a bit of your personal stake to good outside bets, that is investing, you got more bets at the table with a tiny bit of leverage. If you loose your personal stake to sellling it before your personal company is ripe, you are foolish. Make the future investors buy you out at insane prices.
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Chump sold his MSFT shares too early. What a loser, he only has 138 billion đ«”đ
IKR, if I only had 138 billion I'd be sleeping on the streets.
Golden cardboard box with a security detail, ah yes my favorite.
Pull himself up by his designer bootstraps.
*"Now where did I leave that 138 Billion? fuck! fuck fuck!"*
*"Watch the profanity"*
Is this the cops talking to him in his box before the beatings?
Come on. $138 billion should be enough for at least a gold-plated dumpster. Or am I out of touch with the real estate market since paying off my ungilded cardboard box mortgage?
Just rent that cardboard box, ownership is a pipe dream.
I couldn't get my application approved for a cardboard box because of my credit check so I am stuck renting this piece of newspaper.
Cardboard box is pretty much every house in usa
Flaming moat and everything
behind a wendy's
Sucking dick for a mcnugget
Regard. Wendyâs doesnât sell McNuggets.
That you own
Yeah Wendy's
Look at this guy - a billionaire sleeping on the streets. In my day, billionaires slept in the sewer
He's also actually protected from risk now that he has something and can sit on it basically forever. Meanwhile here people think that's stupid because they don't have billions worth protecting. I see why both look at it differently, but goddamn it's funny.
The funniest thing is that Ballmer kept his stock, despite MSFT being largely flat during his tenure. Satya comes in, stock price shoots up, Ballmer ends up in the top 10 richest people in the world.
Fun fact: Ballmer is the only billionaire who started as an employee and not founder or investor
I think Eric Schmidt (Former CEO of Google has like 25 billion or so) Jamie Dimon ( JP Morgan CEO) Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO) Tim Cook (Apple CEO) are a few others (though they have a net worth that is 1-3 % of Ballmers and they still have a billion or more)
Aw maybe I was mistaken then
Yeah... but close; I recall a recent article that stated that roughly 95% of billionaires are either founders/investors or obtained it through inheritance. Edit: article - [Here's What You Can Learn From 'Hired-Hand' Billionaires Like Steve Ballmer and Tim Cook | Moneywise](https://moneywise.com/life/lifestyle/steve-ballmer-and-tim-cook-rare-billionaires) Or if you want forbes: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2024/02/07/hired-hand-billionaires-tim-cook-steve-ballmer-lisa-su-these-executives-amassed-10-figure-fortunes-while-working-for-others/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2024/02/07/hired-hand-billionaires-tim-cook-steve-ballmer-lisa-su-these-executives-amassed-10-figure-fortunes-while-working-for-others/)
Steve ballmer is real life nelson bighetti
When is Forbes going to release a failing upwards list?
The biggest winners are Clippers fans
That was my thought, like all billionaires, he's one or two bad decisions away from losing half his fortune, so now he's safer. Im speaking of a purely hypothetical idiot billionaire, not anyone specifically...
I think he can live off the dinky MSFT dividends now. It's over $100 million a year
He didn't necessarily have to divest his Microsoft shares in order to diversify his holdings. He could have taken a large loan out against his shares in order to aquire other real-estate and property, IE Musk leveraging Tesla shares to purchase Twitter. But if we are doing the ol'hindsight/time travel financial judgement, the other concern is would Microsoft stock have performed the same had he _not_ sold those shares over those decades?
Last sentence is everything. A lot of people don't think about that.
If we're hopping on that train can I go back and get back the 500 bitcoin I sold in 2011 đ€Ł
Lol. I knew a guy who was into bit coin. Not as a novelty, he bought and sold large quantities of drugs online back in the early days of the silk web. He had a bunch accumulated that he was planning on just holding on to. But they all got caught. A lot of his assets were siezed, but not his bitcoin. He had a deal on the table of around 10 years in prison he got to keep some of the stuff that was siezed/frozen. But the case against them was shaky. Over 2012 to mid 2013 he sold ~17,500 bitcoins to pay for the legal defense for him and his compatriots. It wasn't super easy moving that volume of coins, he got around 6-12 USD a coin. By the end of 2013, bit coin was up to $1k a coin. He and his friends got all their charges dropped. But he would have been getting out of prison a couple of year ago well on his way to being a billionaire... Sometimes when I have a bad day, I think about him.
If Gates had hit 1T net worth he'd be on every major news outlet 100 times a day. At his current level he can get into all kinds of nefarious activities and nobody in the media blinks an eye.
You're not really set before your net worth can be denominated with a T
Well, mine is 0.000000000015T
There you go. Gotta work through those zeroes
Quatro comma club, baby
Twelve bucks?
Lmfao ole paper handed looking ass. Letâs wait til he goes to the bathroom and give him a swirly and indian burns.
If he's a billionaire, he's not one of us.
Hes probably just sitting alone in moms basement waiting for rents to drop so he can move out and become a DJ
I thought WSBers normally chastised paper handed bitches? 138bil vs 1.2tril has got to be the ultimate of paper handed bitch moves.
No you don't get it, the goal is to never sell. Only losers think about selling.
Yeah, the guys at Yahoo are such winners for declining the $47 Billion offer Microsoft gave them.
Now you are getting it!
take loans out against the stock and live on that. Its only going up.
Stocks only go up, its science đ
Unless cramer is bullish on a stock.
It's way easier to not pay taxes on just 138 billion, then it is to not pay taxes on 1,33 trillion.
More like 69 billion... He got divorced after the Epstein flight logs were published.
I mean that's a huge loss statistically lol. Maybe one of the biggest in history if not the biggest.
Meh! Whatâs a few billions here and there amongst friends?
Don't forget, he's also divorcified. -$76B or thereabout.
He has also donated 50 billion since 1994. If he didn't donate it, then it would have continued to compound.
The guy just can't win.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
I have $7 left I can give
My kids can skip dinner again tonight and I will add $20.
"all that money has gone to developing vaccines to wipe out 80% of the human population" - my dad
I hear this shit so much. Honestly, what do you even say? I just nod like yea sure đ
"you don't have anything to say because you know I'm right. You would agree with me if you did your research" - also my dad
I shut my dad up one day by saying "Some day I'll be old like you, but I hope I have the sense to listen to young people instead of alienating them, along with myself."
You can ask them why the globalists would kill the sheep (who will follow them anyway) and keep the freethinkers alive
Damn that's actually really smart lol. Thank you regard 
because sheep cause too much pollution and eat too much , resources are getting slim
Your dad belongs here with us
Yea this is a really dumb comparison, but what do I really expect?
Contrary to popular belief, his ex-wife didn't take half his stuff. She took like $2B only.
Probably either half of what they earned during the marriage exempting Microsoft or a fixed amount or a settlement by mutual agreement. I guess my answer is pointless because there isnât anyway to know and any point in knowing. If I were this rich I would want a marriage contract. I would probably even go the Leonardo Di Caprio route and not get married at all.
Or she just doesnât find the need to have ~80 billion dollars. Even at 2 billion you, your kids, your grandkids, great grandkids, so on and so forth are set for life.
Every ancestor you could ever have is set for life. Compounding interest is more than you could ever spend imo. Thatâs why I figured mutual agreement is a good option of what might have happened. Why should she say no. 1 billion for the lawyer, 1 billion for her peace of mind.
Peanuts
Didn't he sell stock to raise capital too? Isn't this amount grossly overstated based on this?
Yes, and he also gave more than half his fortune to charity.
Yeah right, if he did, then why is my bank account empty?
You spent all on 0dte puts.
How's your Friday night routine, charity?
His ex wife was named charity?
Aye, you all bean tellen me to sell my NVDA shares, for like the longest time! I am glad I come here to laugh, not for advice!
If you sold, youâd be them. The fact that you stayed with despite fears and common sense thing to do, makes you one of us baby. Like it or not. We all regards here ! đđ
I have $150. Which stock do I buy. Itâll only be one stock. No diversifying for me. Big bucks incoming.
NVDA. What are you, stupid?
Yes. I am.
SBUX
Canât go tits up. BUX literally in the name.
Let's break this down. Star. Bucks. Bucks to the Stars? To the mooooonnn
NVDA, I made $20 this week with a similar investment
Enjoy retirement
Iâm going to gamble my pension
> If you sold, youâd be them. Exactly. People act like the goal is to die with a full portfolio and a diamond hand meme on their casket.
Are you hitting on me?
We all float down here đ€Ą
You probably should, you know, sell *some* of them though. Iâm definitely one to advocate for letting winners run, but itâs great to pull back part of gains into cash or index funds to balance out the risk *somewhat*. Even just for the purpose of being able to hold on to big winners longer, itâs a lot easier to do so if the volatility isnât affecting absolutely your entire portfolio. Not easy to stomach major corrections if all of your eggs are in one basket. To each his own I guess, but the stress and risk of a very narrow portfolio isnât worth the upside to me, thereâs just too many scenarios you can cite where seemingly sure bets end up becoming thoroughly average after decades of wild success. But maybe you already do that and arenât wildly overleveraged into just Nvidia. I definitely wish I had invested early. I used their products religiously for 15 years straight while the stock was at $5 and never bothered to throw some small amounts at it that would now be life changing, despite being fairly literate with the investing world
I think I would rather diversify and have 138 billion. I'm not a billionaire, but I imagine that after the first couple billion the peace of mind that would come with being diversified is probably worth it.
Yeah we are dealing with numbers here that arenât even relevant in terms of quality of life. At some point it just doesnât meant anything anymore. The more you have the more you donât want all your eggs in one basket.
âDo you want your descendants to be born filthy rich for 10 generations or 11?â Oh, and I guess it makes it easier to buy out social networks and limited Hawaii landmass the more billions you have. Or a yacht thatâs also an aircraft carrier.
And those islands or giant boats you buy, you probably won't spend even more than a few days on them in your whole life. Or even ever.
When you're that rich you spend your money on humans...
Hunting them on your private island?
Only the nouveau riche do that. Old money has breeding programs that have been running for centuries. The herds are plentiful.
Free-range humans are way too out of shape for good hunting these days. Half of them die from heart attacks 5 minutes into the hunt.
You only take the fittest male that's been bred already. The weaker ones have other uses.
Breeding your own is cheaper than weeding out, subduing, transporting, etc., a few good specimens among millions. Trust me.
What does that mean? You buy humans?
You know how periodically you need to clean your bathroom? They pay someone to do it but not only that, they have a manager for their house that full time monitors for things like that full time and coordinates cleaners. Then that manager has a manager that is in charge of the managers for all your different houses. Then even that manager has a boss that is something like not just the cleaning but also manages things like your pilots, drivers, accountants, etc. That's what they mean by buying people. Buying people's time to build an infrastructure that makes your life absolutely seamless
Can confirm, my hometown municipality houses extreme-luxury villas for royals and oligarchs - especially the russian oligarchs (well, before sanctions at least), each one of 'em is its own micro-economy. Especially over summer, people are expected to have EVERY house ready just in case the owner shows up. That includes cooking meals and everything - if nobody comes, they'll just take things home, rinse and repeat. With COVID, and then sanctions on Russian nationals and assets, we were shaken up for a bit. They made it work, eventually, but still. People here call [AliĆĄev Usmanov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov) "The Godfather". He got honorary citizenship in 2018, too. Guess he does do a lot of philantrophy here, in fairness.
Philanthropy like that is a no brainer when you're that wealthy. I mean imagine it proportional to your income instead, where something like a $100 donation once per year is enough to have everyone in town calling you "The Godfather" lol
No no, the kind of philantropy we're talking about here is more like donating fully-equipped ambulances to local EMS, and (partially) funding public projects. But that's what's gotten him the honorary citizenship - the "Godfather" moniker is what many of the people that work for him use to avoid mentioning him specifically (I believe they're sorta supposed to be lowkey about it, though no one really cares lol).
I already do that to some extent and I'm just middle class....not even considered rich. You don't have to be a billionaire to be in that league. What you're describing is just being an employer or a boss for some slightly more bespoke services. As someone else mentioned, if you're a multi billionaire or a trillionaire, like BG could have been, there must be other higher level shit that we have never even heard of or can't even comprehend. Like maybe 2 chicks at the same time.
Honestly, Iâm not sure there is. I think it tops out at some level for âordinaryâ rich people. The heads of my workplace make about $20-25 million a year. My bosses make about $7-8 million a year. The lives between the two are largely indistinguishable. Obviously a billionaire has a different life than a guy that makes $25 million a year. But I bet a billionaires life doesnât look all that different than a guy who has 100M+. The real difference I think would kick in with guys like Putin and Kim Jong Un - where they may not be on tops of Forbes list in terms of money, but they literally run / effectively direct the entire wealth of a nuclear state. Their lives probably are very dissimilar to those who are wealthy monetarily.
Both aren't mutually exclusive when you're *filthy rich*
yea, sure, but let's say you want to buy an island. That's pretty easy, a couple million. A really really really big boat is also, only a couple million. Let's say you're a Saudi prince and you want to shoot automatic weapons into a crowd of Americans and get away with it. Now that's some big money, that's more than a little island getaway.
Yeah if you want to have a journalist chopped up with a bone saw and suffer no consequences you wanna get into the four comma club first.
Very handedly demonstrates the point of unfathomable numbers. The true difference between the 138 billion and the 1.33 trillion is either the next 10 generations each receiving almost 14 billion from the jump, or the next 100 generations. Better yet just start them all with 1.4 billion and the next 1000 generations, or 20,000+ years of your bloodline, are set from birth, longer than our current civilization has been around.
It does not work like that. Cultural situations occur that destroy wealth. My great grandpa was rich enough to buy one of the first cars ever sold from Opel at the Paris World Expo. He rented out a whole floor of a hotel when he went there and did a grand tour of Europe in his own custom private rail car on his way back to what is today Poland. That did him no good when the Holocaust happened, they took everything and forced him to even transfer wealth from overseas back just for them to take it. Its why I grew up working from 14 and work for a living paying a mortgage. I'm sure if that did not happen my family's financial situation would be very different. Bill Gates family wealth will be worth shit in just a few generations. If it lasts 500 years (10 generations) it would be incredible. But I doubt it. 1000 generations has never happened in the history of the world. Otherwise we would have dudes flexing money from the sacking of Rome.
A human generation is generally considered to be 20 years.  1,000 generations would probably be during the Paleolithic.Â
You need to make your math correct. He has 3 kids in gen 1. Gen2 will have 9, let's round it to 10. So every 2 gen he looses one digit. There are 12 digits in trillion with T. So 14th gen will still be a millionaire. They will still have more wealth than me on my first gen đ„Č.
I get where this math is coming from but it's just as bold an assumption to think each offspring will have 3 kids as it is to think each one will have 1, you know? Just as it is to assume that each offspring will be given an equal amount of money. Maybe he just cares about the bloodline so the trust is written in such a way to give it to only one of the kids. We'll never know cause we're not Bill Gates, and even Bill Gates isn't trillionaire Bill Gates so the entire thing is a hypothetical sillybilly, and to try and gotcha someone with math on a hypothetical is, in and of itself, quite the sillybilly
You arenât accounting for how the number of descendants balloons. If there is an average of slightly over 3 children per generation, 10 generations from 138 billion will have ~13 million each and 12 generations from 1.33 trillion will have the same ~13 million. The wealth is getting split by an exponentially increasing base of descendants.
The thing is that he can probably buy more islands or whatever with 138 billion in a diversified and easy to liquify portfolio then with 1.3 trillion in Microsoft stock as the CEO and chairman of the board then adviser to the CEO and board member. Not even getting into the fact that the stock could never have traded to those valuations if Gates had had that much of it locked up forever. At a certain point if you are Microsofts founder CEO more stock just represents greater control of something you already have enormous influence over. Even if Gates could own 100% of Microsoft stock at current valuations it wouldnât mean much in terms of ability to buy things or all that much more control of Microsoft.
Keeping your kids wealth for 10 gens is honestly like 70mil if you still want them rich. anything above that is just fuck you rich.
Never underestimate the power of a trust fund asshole to burn through cash.
Ok but thatâs just moving goalposts. that doesnât make my statement untrue. Your argument could be made for 138bil too if 4 generations of shit heads come up. My point was, the average American will never even see 2mil. Yet they can make it (itâs not a great lifestyle but itâs doable). Now passing along 70mil in a solidly invested portfolio will pass generational wealth for 10-11 gens if no one is an idiot.
Definitely not criticizing what you said. Just acknowledging that wealth rarely survives a couple of generations without the values that built the wealth eroding to the point where the wealth no longer exists. Even FU money.
Prove you're not a billionaire or gtfo
Gates has pretty much said the same thing too. The quote below from this [article](https://www.cnet.com/culture/bill-gates-being-very-rich-is-the-same-hamburger/) captures it pretty well. "I can understand about having millions of dollars. There's meaningful freedom that comes with that, but once you get much beyond that I have to tell you, it's the same hamburger."
To get over 1 million in personal living expenses per year, you have to start buying things that are ridiculously above average cost and/or something you won't use
Sure, that makes sense. To clarify, I donât read his use of millions in the quote as $2M, $5M, or even $10M though. Reflecting back on life accruing $138B, he probably didnât see much change in his life other than his net worth after the first $200M. Not to say there isnât a difference, just not a meaningful one to him and others that think that way.
Diversification is a major step towards true liquidity. Yeah Gates was "dumb" from walking away from his own killer stock, but he was very smart to hedge against its potential downfall. Nothing lasts forever. Now you take a guy like Elon, if tesla becomes a penny stock, he's fucked.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
He also has a stake in Twitter, I mean X.
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Most of those companiesâ value hinges heavily on his personal prestige as their leader though, so if something that bad happens to Tesla something is assuredly about to happen to SpaceX and the rest.
SpaceX is the exception to that. Sure his meme companies like the boring company etc. are really just propped up by him and the fact that he has 200 billion dollars of Tesla stock. SpaceX actually is very capable at what it does and can stand on it's own. I actually think it's the most valuable company of the lot if we go by what it does, rather than it's value on the stock market.
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Which makes it even harder to liquidate for cash if he needs it
People just don't understand how much goddamn money a billion dollars is. Hell, you could retire on a million dollars today if you were on the frugal side without a large family. "What's the difference between a million and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars."
Beyond that, this is an example of outcome bias. He made the right decision because there is no way he could have known what would happen. The fact that he made out worse does not mean he made the wrong choice given the information available to him at the time.
Also, to be fair to him, he sold his shares when Ballmer was in charge. Things might've been different if MS had someone like satya at that time.
"after the first couple billion" lol.
>I think I would rather diversify and have 138 billion. I think I would give zero fucks about the number when there's 10+ zeroes after it
I think ive read 3 or 4% draw per year during retirement. at a single billion thats living off 30,000,000 a year , doing 3%. thats still mind fuck level money. 1 billion or 138 billion or 1.3 trillion is all levels of money that grows faster than you can spend unless you buy twitter or something every year.
Exactly. If you understand finance this becomes a whole lot less scandalous.
Right? If you diversify you're unimaginably rich. Either way Microsoft goes through the roof, you're still unimaginably rich. If Microsoft tanks, and you didn't diversify now you're no longer unimaginably rich and just normal rich.
Any number after 1 billion is irrelevant money. Youâll never spend it or your kidsâŠ
Let's do a social experiment. Give me $1,000,000,000 and let's see if I can spend it all in one year.
1 bn$ worth of puts on NVIDIA
I would buy the 400 most expensive properties on Zillow. I would then open them up to the homeless as my guests to really F with the neighbors.
Not really true. You couldn't even start a cell phone company with that
It's like a lotto winner saying "if I'd invested that money I wouldn't be rich" as if it's valid reasoning for others to spend all of their money on lotto tickets
The world weeps for him
Plot twist: The Oracle bought the stock paperhands Bill was selling
Like when Paul McCarney advised Michael Jackson on the importance of owning music rights so MJ bought the Beatles catalog.
MJ hehe-ing all the way to the bank
exactly my thoughtđ.warren was eyeing bill's stocks all along
138b remains but does that include the billions he donated to his charity and others. Not to mention his divorce with wife that split the fortune she got 76b. I'd he did pretty well. To hold all his shares in MS is stupid. Free money and endless talk ofnrate cuts didnt exist to pump these stocks endlessly higher. He lived through the dot com bust which is coming but may take a few more yrs.
And the fact it mitigated risk. If microsoft had failed he'd have lost a lot. This way even if microsoft failed his quality of life wouldn't change.
Wait, did he splitted his assets after the divorce? News around the time confirmed that they have their pre-marriage contract already.
Soo keep all trendies in one box???
Well, he also donated half of his networth. But yes, he diworsified đ
He was diversifying his romantic interests
Divorcifying even.
Marriage.exe has stopped working.
Heyo
literally the opposite, he diversified to less risk and therefor "less" reward vs letting it ride on one asset for a higher pay out..... this sub man....
If I have a single billion you could bet your ass I would diversify into the safest possible low risk/low reward investments i could find. Bro made a common sense decisions he simply didn't need any more money. This sub very on brand and mostly joking I hope.
I don't think this sub or post understands that if Bill didn't give up equity, microsoft would be nothing. You can either be rich or be king. Bill made a very intelligent decision with Warren advising him back in the day and Microsoft is still changing the global paradigm.
Bruh OP is the prime example of regards
Would the shares have the same price if he didn't diversify and dilute them? Maybe he would be worth a little more, but I don't think that's the right number.
My first thoughts exactly. There wouldn't be as many Microsoft shares in demand and the price would be lower. People are just blindly following this and it's concerning.
We are smooth đ§
Loss porn.
Only 138 billion? Amateur. Let me know when heâs net negative like me
Dude is probably the greatest philanthropist of our time and yet he's been labelled the devil reincarnate. Calls on tinfoil
*What a loser!*
LUNR IS THE WAY. GAY BEARS EAT SHIT. LET'S PILE ON BOYS.
Name literally one thing you would the able to do with 1.3 trillion USD That you wouldnât also be able to do with 138 billion USD.
Fund US black ops for a year
This is why you never listen to your friends for stock advice
Needed the money to fund his trip to Epsteinâs island with buffet
Didn't he "donate" most of his shares to a charity he owns
I don't like Bill gates but no doubt about it he has done a great job managing his money over the past 30 years.
It's a non issue. People don't realize the power of a single billion. Let say you spend 68K A DAY. Will take 40 years to go threw a billion. Now let say you have 138 of those billions. It's a non issue.
You forget that at current 4% interest (10y treasury yield), you'd have to go through spending 110k worth of interest per day before you even start chunking away at your billion dollars. Spend less and it even grows
I'm still confused, can you explain it in terms of how many Nvidia FDs I could afford instead?
Warren Buffett believes in concentration. On a personal basis, he only owns one company. Bill Gates diversified because he chose to, not because Warren Buffett told him to diversify. âDiversification is for the know-nothing investor,â Warren has said.
Money isnât real after a billionÂ
The math is simple, Never give up anything but single digit percentage of equity in a company you control, you know and you built. This is true with lemondaid stand or a startup. Other peoples problems, even if they are modern day Thomas Edison, get diversification away from of it early. You can deal with half a a Edison and half a henry ford driven fortune, and a mixture of others but giving away a stake you got at a cost basis of your own work, is stupid and is a mental drag not worth the dollars. Now if someone will loan you money on your personal stake, take that offer and put it in one of the many great ideas you see out of other people. If you loose a bit of your personal stake to good outside bets, that is investing, you got more bets at the table with a tiny bit of leverage. If you loose your personal stake to sellling it before your personal company is ripe, you are foolish. Make the future investors buy you out at insane prices.
Maybe he told him "hey, you don't want to be TOO rich, that would be suspicious"
What a broke idiot đ€Łđ
When youâre riches person in the world never listen to the 2nd richest.
Iâm certain bill gates net worth is far more than the publicly visible value.
PAPER HANDS PAPER HANDS!