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This isn't trying to denigrate your contribution to charity or Gates'. It is, though, trying to demonstrate that, even on a relative scale, you're not necessary donating as much as you think you are. "So what?" the reader may ask -- and that's the deeper point. How much you give relative to Gates doesn't matter. If people wouldn't turn charity into a wang-measuring competition, I think the world might be at least a marginally better place.

is this proof that sometimes the ends justify the means?

Let's see if the Linux community can match his generosity.

But by having hundreds of billions. the 800 million in donations are just a drop in the bucket. thats less then 1 percent. That is like me donation $100 to charity.

Bill Gates's net worth is currently estimated to be around $30 billion. This single donation is about 2.5% of his net worth.

Who are the Barbarians

I think terrorists would be the best analogy.

...where is the enormous economic divide (don't even begin to talk about the middle-class squeeze, it cannot compare with Roman economics)

Let's compare and contrast the poor and the rich. There are several classes of people making less than minimum wage in the US. Illegal immigrants immediately come to mind. However, waiters and waitresses in some states only make $2.13 an hour because tips would presumably make up the rest. A family living on the minimum wage is certainly beneath the poverty line. In 2000, 11.3% of the U.S. population, or 31.1 million people, lived in poverty. Poverty in the US is defined as earning just less than $15,000. To put this in perspective, rent for a one bedroom apartment in a bad neighborhood of Seattle costs $8400 a year.

Let's compare this with the wealthiest of the US. Bill Gates is reported to be worth about $30,000,000,000. That's six orders of magnitude higher than someone earning minimum wage in the Microsoft cafeteria. Granted, I'm comparing Bill's accumulated wealth to the cafeteria worker's yearly income. However, the income difference is still at least five orders of magnitude. Either way, we're still talking about a medieval or romanesque difference of incomes.

...where was the death of democracy

The highjacking of the 2000 election? The nomination of the president of the US by an activist Supreme Court? The subsequent trampling of the rights of citizens by the administration in the name of security? Shall I continue?

...where are the growingly incompetent dynasties?

We could look at American companies. Costs are a little better, but that's because the work is being done in third world countries. Quality is poor. Customer service is down the drain. Management gets more and more incompentent by the year.

We could look at American students, the "future of America". They increasingly turn to cheating, grade inflation, and teacher intimidation in place of actual learning. They also tend to put sports ahead of academics. There's also the pressure to dumb down classes get high numbers of graduates.

Don't make me bring up the politicians. We already know how incompetent those fools are.

Hmm.. 4,000,000 / 86400 (seconds in a day) = ~ 46 emails a second.

Interestingly enough, according to this, that's right around his current dollars per second mark. I sure wouldn't mind getting $1 for every spam in my inbox.

Lessee....he currently has about $30 billion, so that would be roughly 6.5% of his total wealth at the moment. Mind you, I could probably spare 6.5% of my net worth if the remaining $$ left me well over the $29 billion mark...

According to The Bill Gates Net Worth Page, that $800,000 "slap on the wrist" is about 0.0027% of his assumed net-worth ($30,115,295,145.09)

Gee, isn't $800,000 kind of steep? That's almost a staggering one thirty-seven-thousandth (0.00265%) of his current net worth!

http://www.quuxuum.org/~evan/bgnw.html

By a factor of seven!

(This pointless comment brought to you by my need to goof off)

Thank God you all are not math majors or even business majors... Hopefully you're not working stiffs in those areas either.

One would deduce that the last post in this thread is the most correct, although you could expound upon that.

Gift Cert $50
Markup $15
cost of Cert $50

Pre-sale profit (Gross)= $15 per cert.

But there are additional costs of doing business that may NOT be accounted for:

DIRECT COGS (Cost of good sold)
Less ebay Listing Fee (variable) approx 4% listing fees
Less Paypal transaction fee 2.2-2.9%+ paypal fees
Less your cost of doing business (variable)
- electricity of the computer you use
- expense of equipment (scanner, computer, software...)
- ISP connection charge...

Less possible labor expenses (if you had to pay someone to do this)

INDIRECT COGS
Less lost opportunity cost (what you could have made doing something else)

and finally less your opportunity cost of Capital (what you could have made putting your $ in a bank/CD/money market, if your $ wasn't tied up waiting for an ebay bid to happen) calculating Weighted Cost of Capital and/or Opportunity cost

So perhaps the actual transaction resemble something like this on a monthly basis:

Gross Profit ($15 x 4 certs) = $60
Less direct costs of goods sold (guessing 10% of sales price $5 x 4 items) = $20
Less indirect cost of goods sold (guessing 5% of sales price $5 x 4 items) = $10

Leave you with roughly $30/ month in Earnings Before the real issues ....

Your Time... at $???
(What you should pay someone to do this crap)
Assumne what you will, but I wouldn't bother with anything less than $20 / hour and this will take someone at least 10 minutes to do manually.

Calculate that per hour, unless your Bill Gates who earns $4,000 per minute

Then you compare that to opportunity cost of capital and....

Geese.

No wonder why Apple hasn't tried this.

>
>Why Gen-Xers do it better
>Cheznathalie.com
>

Let's see exactly how much a Porsche Carerra GT would cost Bill Gates (relatively speaking).

His net worth is currently $US34,234,884,352.40 (according to the Bill gates Net Worth Page).
A brand-new Porsche Carerra GT costs an estimated $US400,000.
That means that the cost to Bill Gates is approximately 0.0012% of his total worth.
According to the US Census Bureau, the median net worth of a US household in 1995 was $US40,200. Let's adjust that upward by, say, 10% to take into account the past eight years - the amount is now $US44220.
0.0012% of 44220 is 53 cents.

Conclusion: A Porsche Carerra GT for Bill Gates is equivalent to a couple of cans of Coke for the average American.

...speaking of fortune





If you can't make it good, at least make it look good. -- Bill Gates

It cost Mike Tyson $3 million (he forfeited 10% of the fight purse) when he bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield's ear in a boxing match. Assuming that piece of ear weighed about 1/2 an ounce, Bill could afford to eat 336.81 pounds of Evander Holyfield if he were so inclined. (Thanks to George J Rickle II for the (somewhat sick) suggestion.)

If you think that Microsoft's $40 Billion is an impressive number calculate what Bill Gates would lose personally if Microsoft's stock lost half of its value.

His fortune is less tied to MS than you might think. Gates has diversified his holdings over the past several years and as of Sept. 9th of this year only held 11.6% of the company's stock. I believe his current net holdings are worth $43 billion. MSFT has 5,346,449,872 shares as of Sept. 30th, and it closed on that day at $43.74. On that day, MS stock was worth $223 billion, and he held only $27 billion in MS stock. If he lost half that, he'd go from $43 billion to $29.5 billion (ignoring the fact that an MS crash would take down the whole market). Boo hoo. He'd still have over 100 times what he was worth back in 1986.

Of course, this in no way invalidates your argument which is 100% correct. MS is a very stock price-obsessed company, and a lot of mutual funds invest so much money into it because it's preceived as a stable growth company. A major Enron-like shake-up like Bill Parish has been hoping for would devistate the market as badly as Enron's did. MS's business personnel are wholy obsessed with keeping this growth stable, and it's been well documented that MS uses tricky accounting to smooth losses from one quarter to the next by storing up money from good quarters and counting it as "earnings" later.

Incidentally, the Bill Gates Net Worth Page is an amusing collection of statistics and extrapolations about his wealth, though its data is a little out of date. It shows things like how long he could buy off every major official in the government (if he stopped earning money), how fast you'd have to go picking up dollar bills from end to end to earn money as fast as he has since MS went public (35+ MPH), and how if he can maintain his current rate of growth per year (over 35%!), he'll be a trillionaire by 2014.

Well, based on This site. Microsoft has a total of 4,980,000,000 shares outstanding, worth a total of $276,738,600,000. (That's $276.74 Billion.) The stock market apparently has valued the revenues of microsoft at 277 billion over a lifetime of shareholder value. True, Microsoft office is a major part of that revenue, but if they loose the OS monopoly they're just another software company, and they can't demand everyday people pay $350 for a word processor suite. I can get OEM wordperfect office 2k2 licenses for $10, but Word XP 2k2 is about $30, OEM licensed. Retail versions only have an $80 price difference. Note: these prices are on Standard OEM/Full(respectively), not 'upgrade' versions. The OEM are CD Media and certificate versions (I realize microsoft sells license only versions for less, but I don't sell systems with the software just installed on the hard drive.)
So right now Microsoft can command a 3x premium on OEM bulk licenses, and an $80 retail price difference. All this from a joke word processor that required a whopping 10 MB to install when HDs were still in the 40MB range. Yeah, without the monopoly microsoft word would have gone nowhere fast. BTW I still have all 22 5 1/2" floppies that MS word 1.0 came on.

Speaking of proving ignorance, congradulations for a job well done. You have just displayed your ignorance to the world.

Bill Gates IS NOT MICROSOFT. Bill Gates is a shareholder of Microsoft. In fact, he holds close to 12.5% of the stock source so, if he was able to dip into the cash of the company, he would be entitled to 12.5% of that $40 Billion - $5 billion, not the whole thing.

Therefore the poster you were ripping was closer to correct than you. Would you care to prove your ignorance further, or are we done for the evening?

Well, the Bill Gates Net Worth Page says Bill is worth 33,141,420,513 USD.

So out of his own pocket, this money is 0.00166 per cent of his net worth.

Yes, that's less than two thousandths of a per cent.

Taking a look at my bank account and (non-existant) stock portfolio, that is equivalent to me donating 10 cents to Perú. Tell the president my check's in the mail.

Philanthropy? Yeah, right.

No wonder his calculations are warped

According to the Bill Gates Net Worth Page he is currently worth about 87.9 billion in stock alone. Again, this is not counting other possessions.

According to the Bill Gates Net Worth Page Bill Gates currently owns 18.5% of Microsoft. When Microsoft stock first went public, he owned 49.8%.

Either way, I doubt that he could ever be forced out of the CEO job, unless things were really bad.

Mark Fassler
fassler at frii dot com