Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock
just a small portion of Why Bill Gates is Richer than You by Philip
Greenspun
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Fri Jul 25 20:10:59 EDT 2003
Microsoft Stock Price: $26.89
Bill Gates's Wealth: $60.732674 billion
U.S. Population: 291,604,291
Your Personal Contribution: $208.27
"If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people
He gives it to."
-- Old Irish Saying
Sources
a.. Population: U.S. Census Bureau
b.. 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)
c.. Microsoft Stock Price: Nasdaq or Security APL
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 is an
understatement because it doesn't include the multi-million dollar trust
funds he received at birth from his grandparents, houses, stock, and other
gifts from his wealthy parents, or investments he purchased with sales of
Microsoft shares sold prior to 1995.
What about shares sold subsequent to 1995? Don't they balance out this
understatement of wealth? No. 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?
There are two ways to look at this. One is that Bill Gates is directly
involved in managing his charitable foundation. So he still controls the
money, though of course it will be used only for certain kinds of purposes.
If you were a real cynic you might note that Bill's charitable inclinations
remained, uh, undiscovered until the Federal Government began to file
anti-trust lawsuits. You would then see his charitable contributions as
investments in the maintenance of Microsoft's monopoly and not reductions in
wealth.
Multi-Nationalism
As the author of such books as Canada: More than Just a Brand Name?, I am
well aware of the importance of multi-nationalism. I have therefore heeded
the pleas of thousands and developed an international version of the Clock.
How it Works
... is explained in exquisitely painful detail, including source code, in
Chapter 10 of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. The source code
took about one hour from start to finish and 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 over the Internet was
ignored by most of the rest of the world except for one company: Microsoft!
If you look at Microsoft .NET you'll see that it provides extensive support
for building applications like this wealth clock.
In order to provide you with faster service, and to reduce the load on the
subsidiary Web sites, the program caches the page. However, you can also
operate the clock in real time mode, which will update the cache for
everyone else.
Index
a.. Stale: What the Government Should Do About Microsoft
b.. Updated: How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates
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ph...@mit.edu
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