Bill Gates donates £3.6bn in Microsoft shares
Melanie May | 18 August 2017 | News
Bill Gates has donated 64 million of his shares in Microsoft worth £3.6 billion in his biggest donation to date.
The donation was revealed in a recently released US Securities & Exchange Commission filing and is Bill Gates’s biggest since setting up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000. The recipient is not known but is widely expected to be the Gates’s Foundation.
Bill Gates’s net worth is currently estimated at $90bn. This latest donation reduces his stake in Microsoft to 1.3%. Gates previously gave away $16bn in shares in 1999, and a further $5.1bn in 2000. The majority has gone to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The donation is the biggest made so far this year. The second biggest charitable gift made globally this year came from Warren Buffet, who donated $3.17bn of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities in July.
Well known for their philanthropy, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet also created the Giving Pledge in 2010, which encourages the very wealthy to publicly pledge the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. Originally focused on the US, it has since spread globally, and this year saw easyJet’s Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou join the Pledgers.
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.