Here's how much money Bill Gates makes per minute

The Xennial
·3 min read

Bill Gates and Melinda Gates have been in the news for announcing their divorce earlier this month. After the high profile divorce of Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie Scott in 2019, there’s a lot of speculation about how the Gates’ wealth will be divided. Needless to say there was also a lot of concern about how their philanthropic work will be affected but it seems that both will continue in their existing roles in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and setting goals for what is the world's largest private charitable foundation.

As of today, Bill Gates is ranked the fourth richest person in the world with a net worth of $128.3 billion. Even though Gates made his early billions through Microsoft, the world’s largest software company that he cofounded with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975, he has either given away much of his stake in the company or sold it. Among the entities to which he has donated his stock is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that received $35.8 billion worth of Microsoft stock. Till last year when he stepped down from the company’s board, Bill Gates owned just about 1 per cent of the company’s shares. Which also means that no matter how poorly Microsoft does as a company, Bill Gates’ personal wealth may not be that adversely affected.

How does Bill Gates invest his billions? We sat down with a calculator

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Gates has since invested in several other entities. The Canadian National Railway is one such company in which Gates invested $11.8 billion. He has made similar investments in different publicly traded companies though an entity called Cascade Investment.

Till early this month, Bill Gates was worth about $130.5 billion. However, following the divorce announcement on May 3, Cascade Investment transferred about $2.4 billion in securities to Melinda Gates denting his net worth ever so slightly to $128.1 billion. Despite the small drop in his wealth, Bill Gates managed to still retain his position as the fourth richest person in the world.

Gates has also been in the news for purchasing large tracts of farmland across North America. By some estimates, Bill Gates is said to own at least 242,000 acres of farmland in the US, making him the largest farmland owner in the country.

How much money does Bill Gates make in a minute?

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His wealth has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last several years, which has helped him remain among the top five richest people in the world for a long time. Between 2018 and 2019, Bill Gates’ net worth went up from about $90 billion to about $106 billion. Which is to say he made a cool $16 billion in that one year alone.

A simple back-of-the envelope calculation would reveal that if you earned $16 billion in one year, you’d be making a little over $43.8 million in a single day, which then comes to a little over $1.8 million every hour. Divide that figure by the number of minutes in an hour and you’ll see that Bill Gates makes about $30,400 every single minute.

Different magazines calculate net worth differently. While Forbes runs a live tracking of the net worth of some of the world’s richest people, Bloomberg runs the Bloomberg Billionaires Index to do the same. Due to various factors, there’s always a slight discrepancy in the way the net worth of people is calculated, usually a billion or four here and there.

According to Business Insider’s estimates, Bill Gates made $12 billion and not $16 billion between 2018 and 2019. Which would still make his single minute worth $23,148 of his money.

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