| Sat
Dec 16 02:00:00 EST 2000 |
| Microsoft Stock Price:
| $49.1875
|
| Bill Gates's Wealth:
| $55.546500
billion
|
| U.S. Population:
| 276,333,613
|
| Your Personal Contribution:
| $201.012
|
"If you want
to know what God thinks about money, just look at the
people He gives it to." -
Old Irish Saying
Sources
Population: U.S.
Census Bureau
N shares of Microsoft owned by
Bill Gates: 1995 Microsoft Proxy Statement
(141,159,990 shares adjusted for splits in December
1996, February 1998, and March 1999)
Microsoft Stock Price: Nasdaq
or Security
APL
The Clock attempts to accurately display
Bill Gates's wealth, not the value of his current
holdings of Microsoft stock. We take as a baseline of
his wealth the shares of Microsoft that he held in 1995.
This is an understatement because it doesn't include the
multi-million dollar trust funds he received at birth
from his grandparents, houses, stock, and other gifts
from his wealthy parents, or investments he purchased
with sales of Microsoft shares sold prior to 1995.
What about shares sold subsequent to
1995? Don't they balance out this understatement of
wealth? No. If Gates sold Microsoft shares to purchase
shares in cable TV companies, Corbis, or whatever, we
assume that these investments have performed about as
well as Microsoft. What about charity? Bill Gates was
rich from the day of his birth until 1997 but was
apparently not charitably disposed at any time during
those 42 years. As the Federal Government began to file
anti-trust lawsuits, Bill Gates began to give away some
money. Thus the Clock considers his charitable
contributions to be investments in the maintenance of
Microsoft's monopoly and not reductions in wealth.
Multi-Nationalism
As the author of such books as Canada:
More than Just a Brand Name?, I am well aware of the
importance of multi-nationalism. I have therefore heeded
the pleas of thousands and developed an
international version of the Clock.
How it Works
... is explained in exquisitely painful
detail in Chapter 10 of Philip
and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. The short answer
is that I wrote a
little Tcl program that runs inside the mighty
AOLserver. It took me about an hour from start to
finish. It is not a CGI script that squanders precious
server resources -- an important consideration for this
service, which has gotten as many as two hits/second
(when Netscape linked it from their What's New page).
In order to provide you with faster
service, and to reduce the load on the subsidiary Web
sites, I cache the page. However, you can also operate
the clock in real
time mode, which will update the cache for everyone
else.
Links:
Old: Bill
Gates Money Photomosaic
Stale: What
the Government Should Do About Microsoft
Artistic: a
visualization of Bill Gates
New: How
to Become As Rich As Bill Gates
philg@mit.edu
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