Here's How Bill Gates Spends His Billions
In November of 2019, Bill Gates managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps, finally shaking off his status as a financial laughing stock by making the leap from second to first place on the list of the richest people in the world. No longer a pariah, he could at long last show his face in public again without worrying about the hurtful jeers of onlookers or the pitying pallets of $100 bills left on his front porch by Jeff Bezos with a note that says "keep your head up."
Yes, right this minute, Bill Gates is valued at $110 billion, which is, statistically, a hundred percent more money than you will ever possess if you round up just the tiniest bit. And what does he drop those fat stacks of cash on?
Bill Gates and shady oceanic blood sport
He bathes in champagne and runs a narwhal fight club with Richard Branson.
Okay, no. According to a report by Business Insider, Gates (and this is a hard pill to swallow) manages to both have a boatload of duckets and be a pretty decent guy about it. Yes, he owns a house valued in the nine figure range, and yes, he owns a single painting that he bought for $36 million, but what else was he going to decorate with? Paintings that cost less than that? You plebeian.
All of that being said, Gates has been famously generous with his wealth. He's donated upwards of $35 billion worth of stock, helped to create The Giving Pledge, a club for rich people dedicated to pledging half their Scrooge McDuck money pools to charity, co-founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable foundation that provides education and medical services to the world's needy and to having their name appear before every PBS show in history.
For a real glance into opulence, though, check out the $10 wrist watch he copped to wearing regularly, and his famously down-to-Earth fashion sensibilities, which are less about flash and more about looking like your dad at Costco on a Saturday.