Bill Gates is named world's richest person again

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 often not mature enough to warrant massive grants. There might be a ton of small NGOs doing awesome work all over the world, and they can take small grants (XX,000-XXX,000), but imagine what a nightmare it becomes for them if given the burden of tens of millions of dollars all the sudden. Money solves a lot of problems in the nonprofit world, but sudden cash infusions can often create a lot of bizarre problems.

And on the other side, even if The Gates Foundation gives thousands of six figure grants out, that's not going to make a dent in the overall pool of cash.

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

That's a lot of money.

I met once a guy that worked for some banks that handled middle-east money, and he said it was not uncommon to see some accounts moving around numbers with a crazy amount of zeroes, although he didn't knew what was personal money, what was family money, and what was company money, the amount of money flow still was much, much more than what western people move... but middle easterns don't care about disclosing it.

Oh, the couple of billion for Cancer Research, Brain Research, American Indian College Fund, and OpenBSD Foundation would be fun. Also doing a better OLPC.

We all have dreams of what we could do, its another matter of if those dreams would stay with us at that level.

I agree, even a billion dollars, as free cash (as opposed to illiquid property holdings) is mind boggling. At IMF .9% interest rates that is $25,000 a day you would have to spend just to spend off the interest income.

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