Bill Gates’ sadness: If he went with Microsoft until now, he could be twice as rich as Elon Musk, all that’s left is just over 1% of the stock and the scandalous departure because of the ‘intimacy’ scandal with female employees

Bill Gates should be richer than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos combined

According to Bloomberg, billionaire Bill Gates may feel very regretful when looking at the current Microsoft stock price. He could have been richer than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk combined if he had kept his stock in Microsoft until now.

According to Bloomberg statistics, Bill Gates is currently the fourth richest man in the world with an estimated fortune of $138.5 billion. In September 1998, he held more than 2 billion shares of Microsoft – this is also the time when Microsoft first became the most valuable company in the world.

Currently, Microsoft is still the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of 2.5 trillion USD. That means the billions of shares Gates once held if calculated at Friday’s trading price would be worth about $693 billion, double Musk’s net worth of $340.4 billion and twice as much. three times Bezos’ net worth of $200.3 billion.

Unfortunately, all of that did not happen. Bill Gates sold most of his shares when he left the Microsoft board last year. That time – around March 2020 Gates announced that he was leaving the software giant to focus on philanthropic efforts. Currently, he only holds a 1.3% stake in Microsoft.

However, earlier this year, Bloomberg reported, citing a source close to the company, that Microsoft’s board of directors began an investigation into Bill Gates with allegations related to a female employee last year. This action was deemed “inappropriate” by Microsoft and then forced Bill Gates to resign from the company’s board of directors last year.

Specifically, in 2019, Microsoft received information that Bill Gates had intentionally “became intimate” with a female employee since 2000. A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company’s board of directors had reviewed the matter with a female employee. the help of an outside law firm. Board members hired the law firm to conduct the investigation after receiving a letter from a Microsoft engineer saying she had been in an affair with Gates for many years. It seems that because of these scandals, Gates was forced to leave the Microsoft board before the investigation was completed.

In March of this year, the news that Bill Gates and his wife divorced shocked the world. The cause of this is still not clear, but since then many hidden corners of Bill Gates’ rich and peaceful life have gradually been revealed.

As co-founder, Bill Gates was instrumental in laying the foundation for the company to grow into the giant it is today. But ironically, the period when Microsoft’s stock most flourished was not under Bill Gates as CEO.

Failed power transfer between 2 classmates

Co-founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft created the personal computer software industry and dominated the market for PC operating systems and Office software for many years. As Internet browsers like Netscape developed in the 1990s, Microsoft accelerated the introduction of their own product that synced with Windows. This led to a violation of the monopoly law and they were sentenced in 2000.

Although Microsoft avoided splitting the business, the penalty caused a decade later, the company to miss the days of mobile software, social networking and internet search, falling behind rivals such as Microsoft. Google and Apple.

Joining Microsoft in 1980 and becoming the company’s first professional manager, Steve Ballmer dedicated his two decades as sales director, bringing Microsoft software to 97% of personal computers. all around the world. On January 13, 2000, under the trust of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer officially became CEO – the “captain” at the helm of the Microsoft boat.

During his time as CEO, Ballmer made mistakes that cost Microsoft billions of dollars, losing his dominant position in the market. Its shares have not crossed the $50 mark for more than a decade, a time marking the transition of power in the corporation of two school friends: From Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer.

The first is the acquisition of digital marketing firm aQuantive, everything started in 2007, Microsoft spent $ 6.3 billion to buy this company, but only 5 years later, the software company admitted to losing 6.2. billion USD because aQuantive depreciated. According to GeekWire, Microsoft has not focused on developing the display advertising strengths of the company it has just bought, but only cares about search ads (which is considered a move to compete with Google). Internal problems after the merger also caused aQuantive’s talents to quit, quickly turning this business into a “corpse” worth $100 million.

Another acquisition (this time unsuccessful) also made Ballmer regret his decision. In 2008, Microsoft was willing to spend $ 45 billion to acquire Yahoo. The company’s CEO at this time, Jerry Yang, and some members of Yahoo’s leadership did not agree to make Microsoft give up. At that time, Ballmer considered himself lucky because Yahoo was in a dire situation when business segments were in turn overwhelmed by Google. But since Marissa Mayer took the helm of Yahoo, the company seemed to have undergone a “makeover” that made Steve admit he was wrong when he turned his back on this deal.

In 2012, Microsoft launched the Surface tablet, but suffered an unprecedented slowdown. These miscalculations have earned Ballmer the reputation of “a leader lacking in technology vision in Silicon Valley”.

On October 1, 2013, Steve Ballmer officially said goodbye to employees when he held his last meeting as CEO of Microsoft. Steve Ballmer has left Microsoft, but forever left a glorious mark in the history of this software giant. The CEO of Microsoft also told the company’s employees: “We’re going to have some big things coming up… And we’re going to change the world again.”

Power has since passed to the man of Indian origin Satya Nadella. And the miracle happened to Microsoft.

The moment of revival without Bill Gates

While Microsoft took 33 years from its IPO to hit the $1 trillion mark for the first time in 2019, the next $1 trillion it took them just two years to achieve amid a boom in stocks. technology before the outbreak of Covid-19 and during the epidemic crisis. Apple hit this milestone last year.

At Microsoft, it is not too much to compare CEO Satya Nadella with “king Midas”. In his six years in office, Satya Nadella has turned a stagnant Microsoft into more powerful than ever.

Since taking over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, Indian-born entrepreneur Satya Nadella has reshaped the entire company as the largest seller of cloud computing software, including infrastructure and cloud applications in Office. Microsoft is also the only major technology company in the US to avoid the recent wave of antitrust scrutiny by the US government, freeing them to promote acquisitions and product expansion. Products.

Microsoft’s stock price has surged this year, surpassing Apple and Amazon. As investors consecutively buy into stocks with the expectation of long-term growth in both profits and revenue, and expand into other areas such as machine learning and cloud computing.

Microsoft “has a hand in a lot of things and they’re all doing it very well: From gaming, to cloud, to automation, to analytics to artificial intelligence,” says Hilary Frisch, Chief Analyst at Clearbridge Investment. “It’s a compelling value proposition in the tech world, and they’ll also benefit from both the reopening of economies and the shift towards cloud computing.”