Yep, see FIRE and it’s sibling acronyms.

Is Gates actually spending it faster than his equity is rising in value?

I doubt it, considering he's now the largest private farmland owner in the United States. He's got a LOT of capital and it's growing every second. Now he'll be splitting it with his wife though and I expect we'll hear more stories about his philandering. The guy's a demon. He just uses a PR company now to make himself look humanitarian. He even tried to teach Epstein to do the same to rehabilitate his image. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-g... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...

For a decade he did, though not in the past 5 years. However, it’s kind of funny at those levels of wealth if you buy a 30 million dollar painting for example it’s likely worth more in a decade.

It’s not exactly difficult to spend a billion dollars, yet to spend several Billion dollars per year without retaining any value is basically just charity, politics, or bad investments.