Niclas Hedhman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> This is not true. Bill Gates so called fortune is Microsoft
> itself. Whenever he sells any shares, the pumped up value of MS
> shares will plunge, because the market would take it as a sign of
> weakness if BG sells off.
>
> I am not saying his not rich, but far from as rich as it says on
> paper.
Sorry. Not true. Same arguement as when he was _only_ worth 8
billion though, so it's good to see again! :-)
Fact is, Bill sells a lot of stock every year. He has sold *more*
than the 8 billion he was worth when I saw this arguement first and it
hasn't effected the price of the stock. Well, negatively anyway.
Perhaps you could make an arguement that the more Bill sells the
happier the stockholders are, thus driving up the value of the
company. :-)
If your point is that he can't liquidate is holdings this afternoon
without effecting the value of the company then you're right, of
course. That arguement is a red herring at best though.
A second, far less interesting, correction. His fortune isn't just
Microsoft. If the DOJ were to step in and say that the punishment for
being an illegally operating monopoly is that Bill loses his stock, he
would still be an extrordinarily rich man from the investments he has
made with the stock he had already sold over the years. It's less
interesting because, of course, the *vast* majority of his 100B 'so
called fortune' is in Microsoft.
Not that *any* of this has much impact on the Linux v Windows
discussion that started the thread, but I wanted to make sure people
knew that Bill was a frequent seller.
rw2
--
"Debugging is at least twice as hard as programming. If your code is
as clever as you can possibly make it, then by definition you're not
smart enough to debug it."
-- Brian Kernighan
