Gates’ decision that kept him from being richer than Musk and Bezos combined

Bill Gates was for years the richest person in the world according to the Forbes list until the emergence of Jeff Bezos.

Specific, During the 2010s he was alternating the first position with the Mexican Carlos Slim until the emergence of the founder of Amazon, who is now followed as number two by Elon Musk.

Well, there was a moment in Gates’ work life that could have made him richer than Musk and Bezos combined.

Gates sold his Microsoft shares

His failure, said early, was to sell the shares of his own company. Gates owned the equivalent of more than 2 billion Microsoft shares in September 1998, when it became the most valuable company in the world.

This means that the billions of shares of Gates would have currently been valued at about $ 700 billion, double Musk’s net worth of $ 340.4 billion and more than triple Bezos’s net worth of $ 200.3 billion, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. In just one year, Microsoft shares have risen 50%.

But Gates sold most of his shares when he left Microsoft’s board of directors last year., announcing that he was leaving the software giant in March 2020 to focus on his philanthropic efforts.

It was later claimed that he left because Microsoft’s board of directors was conducting an investigation into an alleged relationship between the billionaire and an employee.