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Several friends of mine work at the Gates Foundation up here in Seattle and they comment a lot about the pressure they're under to GIVE AWAY the Gates' money faster. There's a running "joke" internally there (Gates himself does not find it funny and puts a lot of pressure internally on the folks responsible) that it's been nearly impossible to outspend Gates' financial gains as his own wealth keeps growing too fast.

Kind of a funny thought.

This seems to fly in the face of the approach that Bill and Melinda have publicly claimed to have taken. Instead of "writing a big check" they're managing (very directly it seems) the allocation of funds to effective and worthwhile programs.

There may internal pressure to "give money away" but I doubt many have the freedom to start writing checks for ...anything.

Despite the internal commentary, which is mostly in jest, spending arbitrarily is going to get you fired pretty quick. But there is still a metric ton of pressure to find the right things to spend money on, and they struggle to do so in a lot of cases.

It's interesting to think about from an entrepreneurial perspective, that The Gates Foundation has plenty of capital to "invest" but the companies and programs are often not mature enough to warrant massive grants. There might be a ton of small NGOs doing awesome work all over the world, and they can take small grants (XX,000-XXX,000), but imagine what a nightmare it becomes for them if given the burden of tens of millions of dollars all the sudden. Money solves a lot of problems in the nonprofit world, but sudden cash infusions can often create a lot of bizarre problems.

And on the other side, even if The Gates Foundation gives thousands of six figure grants out, that's not going to make a dent in the overall pool of cash.

I wonder if an element of the foundation could be helping to scale or "staff up" these NGO's to be able to scale/deal with an influx of funding?

Obviously, "staffing up" is time intensive, but I would think they would need an alternative approach if finding worthy organizations becomes difficult.

I got the impression more that the Gates' were eager to devote more money to the foundation, and the hurry is placed on finding worthwile ways to spend that money, rather than literally 'give this to anyone who will take it!'
Bill's still Bill. He's always been conservative with resource allocation.

The old story that he always had a year of wages for every employee in the company liquid at Microsoft from day 1.

It's not surprising. The GF is paid for by disbursing a set % of the endowment's value each year. Obviously the people managing the endowment only have one goal which is to keep it growing.
Sounds a bit like "Brewster's Millions", just with more zeroes.
He should set up a website, enter your bank details (and maybe some unique personal information), click submit and it sends you a randomised sum of money, once. Heck, make the proviso that it signs you up to his annual Gates notes for life ;-)
These lists are pretty arbitrary. They don't include more than $32 trillion hidden in off shore accounts. Putin, Gaddafi, Mubarak, and other third world dicators have many trillions stashed away. That is not even to count the monarchs who practically own entire countries.
I agree on the arbitrariness. But do you have a some links for the $32 trillion hidden offshore. I'm just interested.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/22/us-offshore-wealth...

That's a lot of money.

Although I think people superestimate the wealth of some leaders (like Putin and Khadaffi when he was alive), there is some people much wealthier than Bill Gates.

I met once a guy that worked for some banks that handled middle-east money, and he said it was not uncommon to see some accounts moving around numbers with a crazy amount of zeroes, although he didn't knew what was personal money, what was family money, and what was company money, the amount of money flow still was much, much more than what western people move... but middle easterns don't care about disclosing it.

I wonder what would anyone do with a trillion dollars... I really can't comprehend this numbers...
Oh, I bet you could find something to amuse yourself. I would go with building my own city (can I get to work in ND every day in only a t-shirt) and seeing if my theory of nodal sprawl with high speed rail actually happens.

Oh, the couple of billion for Cancer Research, Brain Research, American Indian College Fund, and OpenBSD Foundation would be fun. Also doing a better OLPC.

We all have dreams of what we could do, its another matter of if those dreams would stay with us at that level.

You could wallpaper the land area of Cyprus with dollar bills and still have around 40 billion left.
what ever they want.. :-)

I agree, even a billion dollars, as free cash (as opposed to illiquid property holdings) is mind boggling. At IMF .9% interest rates that is $25,000 a day you would have to spend just to spend off the interest income.

I vividly remember the BBC reports about the US government flying planes filled with pallets of cash into Iraq - apparently $12 billion in cash was flow in:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

- Bill Gates only owns about $13Billion of Microsoft stock directly.

- Over half of his net worth is in Cascade Investment LLC, a private investment fund run by Michael Larson. Mr Larson appears to be singularly responsible for Bill Gates' return to the top.

- The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is worth over $42 Billion, and is not included in Bill Gates' net worth

http://www.wsj.com/articles/this-mans-job-make-bill-gates-ri...

I actually feel really good about this. I like Bill. I think he tries hard to figure out the right way to spend his fortune. Glad to see he's back on top.
This list is static and not really useful given the swings in net worth of people. A far better and modern list is the bloomberg billionaires index, it is updated nearly daily.

http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2015-02-27/aaa

So I guess the koch brothers' combined estate is really #1?
The Walton family fortune is considerably larger. Only 2 Walton's make the top 10, but there are 6 Walton billionaires, for a total of $175 billion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family

Before the fiscal cliff, WMT moved their dividend pay date forward by a few days so that the Waltons could pay 2012 cap gains on their dividend. They saved over 100 million in tax on ONE single dividend. This level of wealth is almost beyond comprehension. (http://money.cnn.com/gallery/investing/2012/12/21/fiscal-cli...)
Bill gates keep selling shares on several companies and donating stuff, also he does not do any "work" anymore, he only do volunteer stuff.

Why his net worth keeps increasing?

investments, along with the rate of return to wealth in investment markets being greater than the economic growth rate (http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/ec...)
I was going to link to that. Instead here is Mr. Gates' take. http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Inequality-Matters-Capit...
MSFT stock has been performing well in the last few years.
I wonder how he keeps getting so wealthy. He does not own much of Microsoft anymore. 95% of his wealth is not Microsoft.

So how does he keep getting wealthy?

I think he is happier for what he has done with Microsoft more than his net worth.Money is only the consequence of a good job.
Almost 2000 billionaires. Almost 100 in India. 200+ in China. 500 plus in US. 100 some in Russia. WTH.
a $3 billion dollar return on $76 is not that impressive, this is about a 3.9% return.

to put this in perspective, in January 2014 30 year treasuries were yielding 3.92% (although they have come down quite a bit since then).

I assume you mean $76 billion. Because otherwise that would be a healthy 3,947,368,421% return. ;)
haha yes, $76 billion.

also note that if bill gates had simply put all his money in an sp500 index fund last year he would have earned %13.69, or $10.8 billion

There is likely a lot of reasons why investing billions of dollars is not comparable to millions. You stop becoming a participant in markets and become an influencer. I am sure there would be an issue with investing $76 billion in treasuries too.
Although there is no confirmed amounts(obviously), a lot of people feel that Putin is the world's richest man with all the Russian money has stashed away to personal accounts
Any credible people there too?
You could fund a lot of curiosity rovers with that money.
Highways, bullet trains, tons of research grants...
This kind of reality check is extremely effective. I think I'll steal this. Thanks
And still he could only buy about 10% of AAPL.
Well, had Microsoft not sold their "share" of loan to AAPL, they would have held a good chuck ~ 18.1 million shares [1]. Based off the AAPL splits, today those shares would have been 10 times more in count and 100 times more in price.

[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2014/05/20/what-ever-became-of-microsoft...

I wonder what Steve Job's net worth would have been if he never sold his shares.
When he died the greatest contribution to his net worth was his Disney money actually.
He owned 13.9% of the shares post-IPO. That's equivalent to about $104B at today's prices.
It doesn't matter tho since he did.