Most people have probably heard of Bill Gates, best known as the co-founder of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and, more recently, his activities as a billionaire philanthropist.
After helming the tech company he founded for more than a quarter of a century, the former CEO left Microsoft to focus on his charitable endeavors. Gates is currently worth $105.8 billion (as of this writing), according to Forbes, making him the 14th richest person in the world today. However, he has vowed to give most of his money to charity so that “the vast majority of my wealth would go toward helping as many people as possible.”
To facilitate that goal, he established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. “Our mission is to create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life,” according to the Gates Foundation website. Through the end of 2023, the foundation has paid out $77.6 billion since inception, “taking on the toughest, most important problems.”
While the Trust continues to own stakes in two dozen companies, to close out the second quarter, 81% of its holdings comprised just four stocks.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. Microsoft: 30%
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the Trust’s largest holding — by a wide margin — is Microsoft, the company Gates founded. The Foundation owns roughly 35 million shares of Microsoft stock, valued at roughly $14.3 billion.
However, this isn’t your grandfather’s Microsoft. Beyond its legacy software, browser, and operating systems, the company is now a major player in a number of emerging industries. It’s the world’s second-largest cloud infrastructure provider, which also gives Microsoft the pole position in marketing artificial intelligence (AI) products and services to its cloud customers.
Management noted that its Azure Cloud growth included “eight points from AI services,” which shows this strategy is driving additional business. These AI-related services, including its AI-powered digital assistant — Copilot — could generate incremental revenue of $143 billion by 2027, according to analysts at Evercore…
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