Musk is currently valued at $409 billion, according to Forbes.
Melinda French Gates, Bill’s former wife and co-founder of the Gates Foundation, would also rank as the world’s third-richest person with a projected net worth of $300 billion.
Before Microsoft went public in 1986, Bill owned 11.2 million shares, representing nearly 49% of the company, worth around $200 million at the time. If he had kept all his holdings, those shares would have grown through stock splits to 3.2 billion, giving him and Melinda a 43% stake in the company today, worth an estimated $1.4 trillion.
On top of that, the couple could have collected roughly $100 billion in after-tax dividends over the decades, according to Forbes. That amount alone would make Bill wealthier than all but the top 18 of the world’s more than 3,000 billionaires.
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Bill Gates and Elon Musk shake hands at a breakfast meeting with the theme “Dialogue: Technology & Innovation for a Sustainable Future” during the Boao Forum For Asia Annual Conference 2015 in Qionghai, China. Photo by AP |
Instead, the Microsoft co-founder steadily sold and donated his shares over the years, leaving him with an estimated 0.9% stake worth $28 billion, about a quarter of his current net worth. Melinda is estimated to hold 380,000 shares, worth about $170 million, making up less than 1% of her wealth.
Since founding the Gates Foundation in 2000, the couple has donated a combined $60.2 billion, making them the second-largest philanthropists in the U.S., after Warren Buffett, Entrepreneur magazine reported.
In May, Gates pledged to donate 99% of his more than $100 billion fortune over the next 20 years to accelerate his philanthropic efforts through the Gates Foundation.
Melinda has also launched her own initiative, Pivotal Philanthropies, established in 2022. In May 2024, she pledged $1 billion over three years to support women’s and girls’ rights. “We all have power. But there are barriers in society that often keep women from using our full power,” Melinda said in an interview with Elle magazine in March. “Our job is to help remove those barriers.”
