If you ask anyone who is the richest person in the world?
Everyone will point at Jeff Bezos, but the truth is if you take a look at their investment
portfolios, bill gates is still significantly wealthier than Bezos.
And that is not going to change anytime soon.
Bill gates will remain the richest man in the world.
Before you throw at me your angry comments, hear me.
Gates first joined the Forbes billionaire list in 1987 when he was just 32 years old.
But he wasn't going to stay there for long; in the next few years, he climbed to the top
of the list, and in 1995 he became the world's wealthiest person.
And he held that title until 2017, except 4 of these years when warren Buffett and Carlos
Slim exceeded him.
Most people think that Gates's wealth comes from Microsoft, which is not true.
Yes, he founded the company with Paul Allen and was the CEO, but in 2000, he left his
position and handed his job to Steve Ballmer at the peak of the dot com bubble.
As a smart investor, gates knew that he couldn't keep all of his eggs in one basket and has
to diversify even though Mircorost turned out to be way more valuable than anyone could
have imagined back then.
So Before the dot com bubble burst, Gates sold most of his Microsoft stocks.
It seems like he was predicting the crash as some of the other entrepreneurs back then
like Mark Cuban.
Today he owns only 1.3 percent of the company and is still the largest individual investor.
That tiny percentage equals to almost 20 billion dollars.
But wait for a second, isn't bill gates worth over 105 billion dollars?
Yes, and that's what makes him different from his fellow tech billionaires.
To find out why Bill Gates is still the richest person in the world, we have to take a deep
look into his investing portfolio.
One of His biggest and best position is in Berkshire Hathaway.
He owns at least 54 million shares of the company, which amount to around 11.2 billion
dollars.
Berkshire Hathaway is unlike any other company.
It's a holding company that invests in multiple different companies such as Apple, Bank of
America, IBM, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, and owns entire other companies like Geico
or Duracell.
These companies are not from one particular industry, so if one of them goes down, others
would probably compensate.
And remember that these companies weren't randomly picked but by the greatest investor
of our time, Warren Buffett, since he manages Berkshire Hathaway.
Gates also own 18.6 million shares of Waste Management, Inc, which amounts to around 2
billion dollars.
The company dates back to 1968 and offers environmental services to nearly 21 million
residential, industrial, municipal, and commercial customers in the United States, Canada, and
Puerto Rico.
With 26,000 collection and transfer vehicles, the company has the largest trucking fleet
in the waste industry.
Over the last five years, the stock price grew by 113 percent.
That's really a lot considering that it also paid a 2 percent dividend throughout these
years.
It makes it one of the best investments one can make, and since it provides essential
services, it's a safe long term investment.
Gates is also an investor in the Canadian National Railway Company.
He owns 17.1 million shares with a market value of around $2 billion.
It's Canada's largest railway, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its
rail network, spanning Canada from the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia to the Pacific coast
in British Columbia across about 20,400 route miles (32,831 km).
It's a public company that employs 24K people, and as of October 2020, it has a market cap
of approximately CA$104 billion.
And surprisingly, the company handled the current crises pretty well.
the stock plummeted because of the pandemic back in march.
But The company quickly regained its position and is now 30 percent higher than its pre-pandemic
level.
Bill gates love dividend stocks, and the Canadian National Railway is such a company with a
dividend yield of 1.7 percent.
Gates also holds 1.5 billion dollars worth of Caterpillar Inc. it designs, develops,
engineers, manufactures, markets, and sells machinery, engines, financial products, and
insurance to customers via a worldwide dealer network.
It is the world's largest construction equipment manufacturer.
It's traded in the new york stock exchange at over 90 billion dollar market cap.
I think by now you get the picture.
Bill Gates has invested in a wide variety of safe, stable, and prominent companies to
keep his wealth increasing year after year.
He also holds 1.5 billion dollars of Walmart stocks and many other companies.
It makes him immune to crises and volatility and lets his wealth keep growing exponentially
in the long run.
So even if Microsoft goes bankrupt tomorrow or the US economy falls into a long-lasting
depression, gates investments are all over the world, which makes him safe from any turmoil.
That's why he has been the richest man in the world for 18 years.
You also have to take into account that Gates has donated around 30 billion dollars to different
causes, from fighting malaria to solving sanitation problems in Africa to investing billions into
companies that are working on a vaccine for covid-19.
If you take a look at his fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, things are different.
Of course, he is significantly wealthier with 185 billion dollars, but most of his wealth
is tied to Amazon.
So if amazon falls for one reason or another, his wealth will follow up, but Bezos is smart,
and he perfectly understands that.
That's why he is slowly selling his stake at amazon and investing them in different
companies and industries.
In 2019, he sold 2.8 billion dollars worth of Amazon stock.
This year so far, he has sold 7.2 billion dollars.
And that's not by accident.
The pandemic pushed many investors to invest heavily in the stock market since tech companies
proved to be immune to the crises.
Especially when the fed stepped in and injected hundreds of billions of dollars into the market,
which pushed technology stocks, including Amazon, to skyrocket.
It's difficult to predict the future of amazon because the stock market is overvalued but
at the same time, Amazon is going to play a vital role in distributing the vaccine since
it has been building its delivery fleet for over two decades.
Bezos has invested a huge chunk of his cash into Blue Origin.
An aerospace manufacturer that's trying to build reusable rockets to make space exploration
more affordable.
The company has made good progress.
Bezos pledged to invest a billion-dollar into this company every year.
It's difficult to find an exact valuation of this company since it's a private company,
but it probably worth billions.
However, we will be able to know the exact number if the company decides to go public.
Bezos also purchased the Washington Post for 250 million dollars and held a 3 percent stake
in the popular business news website Business Insider.
Having a few media companies can give you some positive press.
He also invested in multiple other companies like Zocdoc or Nextdoor, platforms that connect
people.
He has also invested 112 million dollars in Airbnb and 37 million dollars in uber, so
if one day uber becomes profitable, Bezos is going to take a portion of that.
He is also a big believer in the cloud business, so he has invested in companies such as Workday
Inc.
He is also a real estate investor.
His 165,000-acre Corn Ranch in Texas was acquired as the base of operations for his aerospace
company, Blue Origin, and serves as the test site for the vertical-landing manned suborbital
New Shepard rocket.
Besides that, he owns houses across the country from Beverly Hills to a 10,000-square-foot
apartment in the Century Tower in Manhattan that he has paid over 8 million dollars.
He also has a house in Washington DC, where he spent 28 million dollars.
His neighbors are the Obamas.
In Short, Bezos is rich, but over 95 percent of his wealth comes from amazon.
Over the next decade, Bezos will keep selling billions of dollars worth of his amazon stocks
and invest in a wide variety of industries exactly as gates did.
If gates didn't sell his Microsoft stake, he would worth a lot more since, in 1986,
when Microsoft went public, Gates owned 49 percent of the company.
Of course, after 9 stock splits, his share would have been diluted anyways, but regardless,
he would own a significant chunk of Microsoft and since Microsoft is valued 1.6 trillion
dollars, he would be as wealthy if not wealthier than bezos.
The future is unpredictable, and it's far better to have a well-diversified portfolio
than having all of your wealth tied to one company.
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