Jeff Bezos Photographer: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg Jeff Bezos sold a million Amazon.com Inc. shares this week for $1.1 billion, according to a U.S. securities filing on Friday. The sale represented 1.3 percent of his holding and leaves Bezos with a 16.4 percent stake in the retailer. The world’s richest man said in April he would sell $1 billion a year in Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin LLC, the rocket company fueling his dream of sending people into space. He had already sold another batch of a million shares in May.
That Gates only owns 2%? Ballmer is the largest at 4-5% so for every dollar increase he gains, a billion or two. When Satya beat and it went from $34 to $36, years ago, he essentially made his Clippers buy back. Gates has been, a few percent, for a long time, as he was selling huge chunks to fund his 2 foundations, 10-15yrs ago. His investment vehicle Cascade, is managed by Michael Larsen, and has/had stakes in Deere, Ecolab, 4 Seasons, and a 4-5% stake in Berkshire. No idea what that family office still holds but considering Gates is at the top until this recent AMZN pop it's safe to say this family office manager is kicking ass.
Hahaha Touche! Gates has never had a significant dip in wealth either that I can recall. It's always been $70B +/- $10B. Fair point though and here is 2 articles on holdings: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/08/bill-gates-trust-80-of-equity-in-these-5-stocks.aspx and https://www.gurufocus.com/StockBuy.php?GuruName=Bill+Gates Both somewhat dated being filings indicate positions, a quarter behind. I seen elsewhere he had positions in Coke Femsa(Mexico's), Ritz Hotel in San Francisco, Starwood...straight out of Buffett's playbook it seems. Found this: Cascade does not publicly disclose its performance results but it has been reported that because of Larson’s relatively conservative strategy, Cascade’s losses in the 2008 financial crisis were smaller than the industry average for the full year. Since 1995, Larson has delivered a compound annual return of around 11 per cent.(https://www.ft.com/content/ce87f48a-7208-11e5-9b9e-690fdae72044). I'd take 11%, per year, for 2 decades investing tens of billions!
He's gifted, but it's merely by information. The ability to know what banks and regulators are going to do is as good as gold. Remember, his father was very good friends with David Rockefeller.
Jeff Bezos-backed vertical farm is expanding Indoor-farming startup Plenty is building its first full-scale outpost in the Seattle area. The San Francisco–based company snagged $200 million in Series B funding in July from investors including SoftBank's Vision Fund, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt and Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions. Expected to open in the first half of 2018 in Kent, Plenty's place will employ a workforce of indoor farming engineers, organic growers and operations experts.(Puget Sound Business Journal)