It's crazy how Thomas has more than double the karma of the next highest person.

Wealthfront, for example, currently cites a 3-year annualized return of 5.67% on its best batch of portfolios (ie tax-advantaged), and a 5-year annualized return of 9.44%.

By contrast, a pure S&P play would have provided 10.09% annualized over 3 years and 15.17% over five. Links are here:

https://www.wealthfront.com/historical-performance http://quicktake.morningstar.com/index/IndexCharts.aspx?Symb...

I don't believe BillG had all his money in S&P index funds. But he and/or his managers were able to find other investments that did even better. That's not easy to do, given markets of recent years, as the Wealthfront data indicates.

https://blog.wealthfront.com/illusion-stock-picking-skill/

That is, if you could figure out which listed companies were going to fare the worst and build a partial index fund with the rest, you'd beat the index.

Similar research style to short selling but with less downside.

For example, Twitter's prospects on its own don't look so great right now. But if that induces you to avoid owning Twitter, you miss out on a quick profit (perhaps even a big one!) if some larger company decides to buy it.

Individual investors pretty much all do worse than market.

EDIT: obviously that means there is skill involved. But it seems that professional managers are close enough in skill that luck is the dominant factor.

At that scale, the S&P isn't even a good benchmark, because it's not like a single investor can just dump that much in an index fund or even in the underlying companies directly.

But yeah any halfway sensible plan will leave a billionaire fantastically wealthy even in failure.

The average American lifespan is 2.4 billion seconds.

If you were shoveling 100 dollar bills, you could actually do some damage in the relatively short term (you could probably reasonably shovel $5k-10k/10s, or $500-1k/s, so you could burn through a billion every 1.5-3 weeks (assuming you never sleep or eat).

If you were working a 40hr week shoveling hundreds, it would take 6-12 weeks to burn through a billion.

If you were doing the same but with singles it would take 6-12 _years_ to burn through a billion.

So if you started with $30B - it would take between 180 and 360 years to get rid of all that money by shoveling it into a furnace.

You could literally have a few generations of heirs whose job is shoveling money into a furnace and they would be considered significantly wealthy for most of those generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Investment

Bill Gates certainly isn't the first to play the philanthropy card after a ruthless spell in business. There was John Rockefeller before him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller#Legacy

I hardly call being a eugenicist "making the world a better place". The Nazis tried it too. They also thought they were "trying to make the world a better place". Bill Gates is a notorius eugenicist.

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mal...

Isn't this site basically run by programmers? Ya'll can't type into a search engine though? I mean really?

You could perhaps argue that his work in education will lead to a more capable tech workforce in the future, but even then, the returns won't go to him.

Fewer people in the world dying from polio and malaria? Not all returns have to be monetary, or measurable.

Edit: I'm just trying to understand why you think it's more precise to label what Bill Gates is doing as "philanthropic investment" as opposed to "giving money away."

For example, consider the following scenarios:

  - I pay for my college.
  - I pay for my son's college.
  - I pay for my niece's college.
  - I pay for a stranger's college.
  - I pay the university directly so that more strangers can attend.

It doesn't seem like there's a hard line anywhere. Probably just two ways of looking at the same thing, which for me anyway has an effect on how I use my money (I don't want to "give it away" but am happy to "spend it" on making others' lives better).

How much of his fortune has he actually spent?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...

>As of May 16, 2013, Bill Gates had donated US$28 billion to the foundation.[1][9]

Citations: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/foundation-timeli... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-16/bill-gates-retakes...

Apparently he is worth 90 billions. Let's assume he has donated 2 more billions in the last 4 years to make it 30 billion. That means he donated 25% of his worth to his foundation. I'm sure he has donated money to other things.