Bill Gates is one of the best-known billionaires in the world.
The Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) founder became the first centibillionaire in 1999, decades before anyone else reached that level of wealth. He’s still worth well over $100 billion today despite giving away billions to charitable causes and nonprofits over the past 25 years. Most of his donations go to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to enhance healthcare and reduce poverty around the world.
Gates isn’t the only centibiliionaire funding the nonprofit. Warren Buffett has also pledged donations to the foundation since 2006, but those contributions will end after his death. Buffett also served as a trustee until 2021.
The foundation’s trust includes an equity portfolio valued at around $46 billion today, but over two-thirds of that amount, about 68%, is invested in just three stocks.
1. Microsoft (37%)
It’s probably not a huge surprise that Microsoft makes up a significant chunk of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. Bill Gates founded the company in 1975 and remains one of the largest individual shareholders despite donating and selling millions of shares worth tens of billions of dollars.
Gates made a $20 billion donation in 2022, and a large portion of that donation appears to have been in the form of Microsoft stock. The trust’s share count increased by over 38 million that year. It now has about 36.5 million shares worth nearly $16.8 billion, as of this writing.
The Gates Foundation has been able to hold on to most of those shares, and it’s paid off handsomely. Microsoft shares are up more than 63% since the end of July 2022, driven by surging demand for artificial intelligence.
Microsoft has become a leader in AI, thanks in part to its investment in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. It added $10 billion to its investment in early 2023, which positioned it as a top choice for developers looking to use the public cloud to train and deploy AI-powered applications. AI-related services helped drive its Azure cloud platform revenue growth of 31% in its most recent quarter. That’s faster growth than…
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