A Billion Here, A Billion There, It Starts To Add Up

Bill Gates turns 64 today.  That's pretty close to retirement age--I hope he's got a nice nest egg.

While the numbers change day to day, I believe he's worth over $100 billion at present.  That may sound impressive, but is it that different from being worth $100 million?  I couldn't tell the difference.  Maybe he could, but at a certain point--let's say when you can afford to lose a few billion--the number just doesn't matter any more.

For much of his adult life Gates was the richest man in the world.  Now he's #2 behind Jeff Bezos.  Does he care?  I wouldn't. In fact, being anywhere in the top ten would be good enough.

He made his money as the main founder of Microsoft, of course.  It was one of the most successful stocks of the 1990s, going up in that decade about 10,000%.  The weird thing is, to a lot of people, being head of Microsoft makes him uncool.  The company is allegedly boring, whereas Apple is fascinating. For that matter, Facebook and Google are also pretty cool, at least compared to Microsoft.  I don't know why, but that's how it works.

When Gates was in his 30s, he wasn't just one of the richest guys around, he was also one of--maybe the--youngest billionaire around.  Now, younger than Gates, is the Amazon billionaire (Bezos) in his 50s, the Google billionaires (Page and Brin) in their 40s and the youngest multiple billionaire on the block from Facebook (Zuckerberg) in his 30s.

Oh well, you can't stay young forever.  But you can stay rich.  By the way, the other major Microsoft billionaire, Steve Ballmer, is only worth half as much as Gates.  Must be tough.