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Bill Gates Fined $800,000 Over Stock Purchases
Bronz writes "CNN Money is reporting that Bill Gates has been fined $800,000 for violating antitrust waiting period for stock purchases. The department alleged that Gates bought more than $50 million worth of stock in ICOS Corp. through his personal investment trust and failed to notify antitrust officials about the purchase, as required." It's also clarified: "The technical incident has nothing to do with the government's massive antitrust battles with Microsoft."
It's not like doesn't have the money. Fining him 800k is like fining me 5$.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
$800K just for forgetting to do your paperwork? They definitely take this stuff seriously.
$50 mil stock buy and a 800k fine... lets do the math
800,000 / 50,000,000 = 1.6%
A 1.6% fine? That seems low when so many dollars are involved.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Again the fine is so low in comparison to gain to make it almost negligable and totally ineffective.
Rake Free + Mac Poker: CardCrusade
This is not tech news. This is personal news about Bill Gates with nothing to do with Microsoft. Other than to laugh at and make fun of Bill Gates, who cares about this stupid story. Post better stories or don't post anything at all. Right?!?
It is called investing. Something to do with making money (and being on the board of directors, which is why he ran afoul, I believe)
And it was Bill Gates investment, not Microsoft's.
There are so many ways this money could have been better spent. How about opening a nice call center for all of your customers, Mr. Gates? (note: i realize this was his personal fortune, but the point stands. MS support is a pain) How many starving children could you have fed. Doesn't pissing your cash into the wind kind of contradict having the largest charity fund on earth? This dude is seriously bipolar.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
I like what some counrties do -- for fines, they use a percentage of that persons earnings or total wealth (i forget which) and calculate the fine based on that. You don't gouge the poor, and the rich pay a reasonable amount.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
As with other violations of anti-trust laws and agreements between MS and the DOJ, Bill and his gang really don't care because the "fine" will always amount to pennies. Billy knows that the reality is he is above the law. What needs to happen here is something more substantial like the threat of jail.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
its other peoples companies.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Not his sort of thing?
Making money is is sort of thing. I hope you didn't think software was his sort of thing. Maybe 30 years ago, but I think he's moved on.
Yeah! I held up a bank and got 12 years, but he drove 20mph over the limit and all he got is a fine?? Mere slap on the wrist! How unfair!
Bill Gates' "crime" is merely failing to report a perfectly proper transaction on time. Marth Stewart used inside information (not in itself a crime in US) and then conspired to cover it up. She may have been a "woman-champion", which is why your wife may sympathize, but her crime is of much bigger scale, than this one.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Maybe my wife is right...
.net care package and some servers to their IT department as well.
it's a woman thing.
Or perhaps it's a total bitch thing. Martha probably would've been let off the hook, but she probably barked at them about how to properly conduct the investigation, how to cordially approach someone with charges, what not to wear at a hearing, proper speaking skills at a press conference, etc etc etc.
More than likely, Bill just volunteered the money and told them not to spend it all in one place. He probably tossed over a large
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
...this is the same thing they were stucking to El Pres at the beginning of his term. And just like then, it's getting blown out of proportion. Not to say they both aren't slimeballs but this is just incorrectly filing paperwork. Nefarious plot to swindle bazillions from Joe Consumer? Maybe... Idiot accountant fogetting to put stamp on envelope... more likely.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
So what exactly makes this news-worthy? Is it possible that this sort of thing happens frequently? Judging by the miniscule amount of the fine in comparison to the dollar amount spent, I can't imagine why this is a significant fine (as someone else has posted, a 'disclosure oversight').
For all the griping we do about the duplicitous nature of certain 'fair and balanced' news outlets (and their ilk), it would seem we'd hold Slashdot to some sort of standard.
P.S. Yes, I know this has been hashed, rehashed, and then many times again. hash_count++
Moo
What, you mean being a convicted monopolist means that I have to register everything I do?
No, not at all. However the business rules in this country state that the list of anyone holding more than 10% stock of a publically traded company must be made public. Furthermore, it is the responsibility of the person who perchases the stock to report this information. Mr. Gates is not being held to a higher standard than anyone else.
This was a fine on Gates personal investments, so why is this even /. news worthy? Yes, it is peripherally related to anti-trust matters, but it is still pointless.
I love all the conspiracy theory that pops up right away how MS is going to be selling drugs and other bs. A common investing strategy is to have a diverse portfolio and this is clearly part of that for Bill.
This is probably something that's merely an oversight on behalf of his broker. Someone with as much money as Bill Gates will have a wide and varied stock portfolio, and I doubt he is able to personally oversee all of it. You see this same sort of thing happen all of the time with celebrities. Too much money and not enough time to track down where every cent goes.
Aside from that, its really sad the level that slashdot has sunk down to in its anti-microsoft smear campaign. I think in the interest of fair journalism, they should go ahead and report to us how much money they, and OSDN as their parent company, have vested in linux, and how much they stand to gain from its success. Notice how they're the first in line to bash SCO for spreading its FUD, when they're just as bad about it? Oh well, they'll just keep going about alienating everyone who isn't a frothing linux zealot and end up digging their own grave.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
good point. it's called a diverse portfolio, and typically a good thing, for all those who havn't mastered the obvious yet.
If you're going to re-trample this same ground, at least think about it a bit more. It's pathetic that there are so many posts modded up which are one or two lines saying "Gates is really rich, so 800k doesn't mean much to him." and a few more posts saying how we should fine him in proportion to his net worth, so it'll actually discourage him.
This is idiotic. 90% of the posts don't even refer to what rule he violated, simply to the quantity of the fine. You don't give 10 years in prison for a parking ticket, regardless of how much you dislike the offender. His "crime" here wasn't that he launched some anti-competitive hostile takeover of some open-source small-business, it's that he bought some stock (some, not a controlling interest) and didn't officially notify the government about it. This is a mistake, but not an offense that warrants docking someone a week's pay, regardless of what their salary is.
Of course, those complaining about the size of the fine aren't at all interested in the law, they're simply happy to see someone they hate getting penalized and wish it was more.
By my estimate, if MS stock inflated by even a cent on the share, Bill Gates would have enough gain to wipe out the fine and have enough spare change to buy several additional homes.
This is before you consider the rest of his amazing wealth, the interest that is gaining, or any other aspect of this.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
He loses more money when he leaves chunk change in his pockets and puts the pants through the wash!
Diminishing marginal utility.
Basic concept from microeconomic theory: the more you have of something, say for example money, the less each additional unit is worth to you. The marginal utility a person who makes $1 a day gets from a $1 is absolutely massive (life changing experience) compared to the marginal utility a billionare gets (almost nothing).
Adjusting fines and taxes to higher income is not discrimination, it's recognition of the fact that not every dollar is equal.
The % of the fine relative to the purchase was too low, not the % relative to his income as most people here will claim...
Compared to the purchase, it was somewhere less then 2%, which i bet will be nothing compared to the % of return he gets during sale. This is what i see as the problem, not that he has a bizzilion in the bank.
At least as far as I'm concerned thats how it should work.... But i dont make the rules.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Bill Gates is not Mr Burns. He doesn't sit around calling the shots on his investment account like some daytrader. Furthermore, this is probably a blind trust due to the fact that information of a *personal* investment in any technology stock, by Mr Gates, is likely material news in and of itself and influence the price.
There is no news here. The guys running his trust fucked up, and they're probably the ones paying. Why? Because otherwise Bill can just take his business elsewhere.
But really, people. This guy's got a ton of money that gets invested for him by his mob of finance monkeys. Ultimately, he pays the price when one of them screw up, but do you really think that he called his broker and insisted on this deal?
Okay, so he screwed up by hiring some folks that didn't do their research prior to making an investment in his name, but let's not harrangue the guy for it. There are much better reason for which to lambast Bill Gates!
P.S. - If we spent as much time focusing on what we could do to make Open Source superior to Microsoft's crap as we do on on poking fun at Microsoft's crap, we might actually have had fully superior products by now...
I couldn't agree more. When new people or journalists in search of information or background for a story come to this site and see that and the broken Windows icon, the first conclusion that they're likely to make is that they won't find much of an objective nature here, i.e. "Oh, this is just a site for a bunch of zealots, nevermind".
Now, it's true that the forum is opinions and commentary, as it should be, but should this extend to the stories and visual icons of the site? One is much less likely to believe someone with an obvious agenda, and I think that's why behavior like this does more to hurt the editors' objectives than to further them.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.