Bill Gates is named world's richest person again • Hacker News Board

Re: Bill Gates is named world's richest person again

#51

Post by sharkweek » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #48

sharkweek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the internal commentary, which is mostly in jest, spending arbitrarily is going to get you fired pretty quick. But there is still a metric ton of pressure to find the right things to spend money on, and they struggle to do so in a lot of cases. It's interesting to think about from an entrepreneurial perspective, that The Gates Foundation has plenty of capital to "invest" but the companies and programs are oft…

I wonder if an element of the foundation could be helping to scale or "staff up" these NGO's to be able to scale/deal with an influx of funding? Obviously, "staffing up" is time intensive, but I would think they would need an alternative approach if finding worthy organizations becomes difficult.

I do think there is a pretty big incentive now for really smart people to work on the world's most important problems (disease, famine, poverty, education, etc) knowing there is a lot of capital to back it up. I know internally at TGF they've been working to market their grant programs better to encourage more young "startup" companies apply.

Re: Bill Gates is named world's richest person again

#52

Post by unprepare » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #33

sharkweek wrote: post #31

Several friends of mine work at the Gates Foundation up here in Seattle and they comment a lot about the pressure they're under to GIVE AWAY the Gates' money faster. There's a running "joke" internally there (Gates himself does not find it funny and puts a lot of pressure internally on the folks responsible) that it's been nearly impossible to outspend Gates' financial gains as his own wealth keeps growing too fast.…

This seems to fly in the face of the approach that Bill and Melinda have publicly claimed to have taken. Instead of "writing a big check" they're managing (very directly it seems) the allocation of funds to effective and worthwhile programs. There may internal pressure to "give money away" but I doubt many have the freedom to start writing checks for ...anything.

I got the impression more that the Gates' were eager to devote more money to the foundation, and the hurry is placed on finding worthwile ways to spend that money, rather than literally 'give this to anyone who will take it!'

Re: Bill Gates is named world's richest person again

#53

Post by bhayden » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 9:45 PM UTC

blahblah3 wrote: post #39

a $3 billion dollar return on $76 is not that impressive, this is about a 3.9% return. to put this in perspective, in January 2014 30 year treasuries were yielding 3.92% (although they have come down quite a bit since then).

There is likely a lot of reasons why investing billions of dollars is not comparable to millions. You stop becoming a participant in markets and become an influencer. I am sure there would be an issue with investing $76 billion in treasuries too.

Re: Bill Gates is named world's richest person again

#54

Post by makeset » Mon, Mar 02, 2015, 9:48 PM UTC

blahblah3 wrote: post #50

archagon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you mean $76 billion. Because otherwise that would be a healthy 3,947,368,421% return. ;)

haha yes, $76 billion. also note that if bill gates had simply put all his money in an sp500 index fund last year he would have earned %13.69, or $10.8 billion

Also note that putting that kind of money anywhere creates so much market impact in practice that the gains diminish considerably.

E.g. SPY, the most active S&P500 index (also the single most heavily-traded U.S. stock), had a total dollar volume of $275B for all of 2014. Buying billions' worth of it, even over long periods, would drive the price up in the process and make further purchases more costly.

Re: Bill Gates is named world's richest person again

#55

Post by blahblah3 » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 3:50 AM UTC

makeset wrote: post #54

blahblah3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

haha yes, $76 billion. also note that if bill gates had simply put all his money in an sp500 index fund last year he would have earned %13.69, or $10.8 billion

Also note that putting that kind of money anywhere creates so much market impact in practice that the gains diminish considerably. E.g. SPY, the most active S&P500 index (also the single most heavily-traded U.S. stock), had a total dollar volume of $275B for all of 2014. Buying billions' worth of it, even over long periods, would drive the price up in the process and make further purchases more costly.

he obviously wouldn't put it all into spy, you can buy a diversified portfolio of stocks that basically replicates the s&p 500.

http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummar... (74 billion dollars traded in one day)

Re: Bill Gates is named world's richest person again

#56

Post by brador » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 9:28 AM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #33

sharkweek wrote: post #31

Several friends of mine work at the Gates Foundation up here in Seattle and they comment a lot about the pressure they're under to GIVE AWAY the Gates' money faster. There's a running "joke" internally there (Gates himself does not find it funny and puts a lot of pressure internally on the folks responsible) that it's been nearly impossible to outspend Gates' financial gains as his own wealth keeps growing too fast.…

This seems to fly in the face of the approach that Bill and Melinda have publicly claimed to have taken. Instead of "writing a big check" they're managing (very directly it seems) the allocation of funds to effective and worthwhile programs. There may internal pressure to "give money away" but I doubt many have the freedom to start writing checks for ...anything.

Bill's still Bill. He's always been conservative with resource allocation.

The old story that he always had a year of wages for every employee in the company liquid at Microsoft from day 1.